White House hopeful Mitt Romney may have emerged stronger from ferocious attacks by his rivals on his business record, an issue he is sure to face if he is the Republican candidate.
"The worst thing to happen to a candidate is a surprise in October," with little time to fight back before the November 6 elections, said Erika King, a politics expert at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
Battered but victorious in New Hampshire, Romney heads Wednesday to South Carolina where he will be welcomed by a television ad blitz painting him as a callous corporate raider who made millions by putting people out of work.
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The attack, by a group allied with former House speaker Newt Gingrich, did little to slow Romney here. But it is sure to mirror the strategy of President Barack Obama's reelection campaign against the backdrop of high unemployment.
Obama "wants to put free enterprise on trial. In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake," Romney said in his victory speech here.
While it will resonate better with Democrats and perhaps independents than Republicans, who trumpet unfettered capitalism as a force for good, Romney may be somewhat "inoculated" by the early blows, said Matt Dickinson, a political scientist at elite Middlebury College.
Dickinson compared the attacks on Romney's time at Bain Capital, where he built a fortune estimated in the $200-million-dollar range, to candidate Obama's struggles in the 2008 Democratic primary with inflammatory remarks by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, including "God damn America."
Having the controversy emerge early "allowed the Wright issue to get resolved, and more generally gave Obama the time and experience to learn how to respond to these attacks," said Dickinson.
"It doesn't mean these attacks don't hurt him, but it's better to come now because voters will have heard them, the media will have written about them. It's easier for Romney to try to put them aside," said King.
Gingrich himself made the argument in an interview with CNN, saying that Romney would face a merciless Democratic foe if he wins the nomination.
"Whoever we nominate had better be tough enough and thoroughly enough vetted before they get the nomination, because what you don't want to do is nominate somebody and find out in September that they have a fatal weakness and then you can't do anything about it," he said.
Former New Hampshire governor John Sununu, a close Romney ally who has denounced the attacks as coming from Republican "socialists," did not disagree.
"Maybe that's to Mitt Romney's advantage that this happens now in the primary and enables him the time and the opportunity to sharpen the message and to talk more about it" he told MSNBC.
The bigger problem for Romney may be that the fight showed how ill-prepared he was to fend off an entirely predictable line of attack on his record -- one credited with derailing his 1994 run for the Senate -- and the issue in general.
In the last few days, the candidate served up a handful of gaffes and had one statement about his desire to strengthen consumers against health insurance companies -- "I like being able to fire people that provide services to me" -- taken out of context and used as a cudgel against him.
He suggested politics is a rich person's game -- "never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage" -- and implausibly said he feared losing his first job out of Harvard Business School.
At a press conference called specifically to address the problem, Romney scoffed at any suggestion "that I should spend my entire campaign carefully choosing how everything I say relates to people.
"He's developing an argument to fend the attacks off. But he will need better explanations about what he did as a venture capitalist in the general election," Michael Traugott, a political science professor at the University of Michigan.
"I don't think you can make this old news. A main theme of the general race will be about who can do a better job for American workers. And so this is a weakness for Romney in terms of the general election," he said.
