You gotta admit, it's a pretty savvy attempt at spinning the obvious lack of enthusiasm for Mitt Romney within his own party:

Having failed to secure the nomination in the first two months of voting, Mitt Romney is turning in earnest, his aides say, to the playbook of slow-but-sure delegate accumulation written by none other than the man he wants to replace in the White House.

Like the team that engineered President Obama’s victory in 2008, Mr. Romney’s lawyers and strategists say they have devised an approach to the second half of the primary campaign intended to ensure that he methodically amasses the 1,144 delegates necessary to win the nomination, staying ahead of his rivals in that count even if they win the popular vote in some states.

See that? He's just like Obama. Except, unlike Romney in 2012, Obama actually faced a formidable opponent in 2008, in the form of Hilary Clinton, who remained the presumed frontrunner even after Obama started to assemble a delegate lead. Romney, on the other hand, is drawing little more than a third of the vote against Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich for chrisakes, a field of jokers he consistently outspends a kajillion to one.

Regardless of how slavishly the media cooperates with this spin job ("Romney wins big" in WA, Seattle Times? 37 percent is "big"? Really?), Romney 2012 and Obama 2008 are simply not comparable, apart from the fact that both campaigns would eventually go on to win their respective party's nomination. Obama methodically accumulated a delegate lead against an arguably viable and exciting opponent (Clinton is a helluva campaigner, and as a woman, her nomination would've been just as inspiring and historic as Obama's). Romney on the other hand, well, as even some GOP officials admit, he's in the process of winning the Republican nomination "by default."

The delegate math aside, the better comparison for Romney is John Kerry, who captured the Democratic nomination in 2004 largely on the single merit of electability, despite running an uninspiring, everything-to-everybody, milquetoast campaign. There are a lot of factors that led to Kerry's loss in the general election, but surely one of them was the relative lack of enthusiasm within the Democratic base for their nominee, as opposed to against President Bush.

Challengers have two tasks: They must both make a compelling case for kicking out the incumbent, and make a case for themselves as a compelling alternative. And if Romney can't manage that second task within his own party, it's hard to see how he'll achieve it with independents and swing voters.