President Obama's senior adviser says Mitt Romney was overshadowed by ambitious Republicans who want to run in four years.
President Obama's senior campaign adviser David Axelrod said Friday that the Republican National Convention seemed more "like open mic night for 2016 candidates and not a convention that's aimed at promoting Mitt Romney in 2012."
"I don't think they did a lot to advance the cause of Mitt Romney," he told MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
The day after Romney officially accepted the GOP nomination for president, Axelrod criticized Romney's acceptance speech as full of "snarky" attacks against the president and gauzy proposals without specifics.
"I think that what people were tuning in hoping to hear were practical solutions to the challenges we face, and what they got were some snarky lines about the president, some gauzy reminiscences about the past and some buzz words for the base, but what they didn't get were real practical solutions and what they didn't get were his actual proposals," he said.
"I thought that film they did was very nice; I'm sure they regret that more people didn't see it," he added.
A documentary short on the Romney family played to the convention hall and cable news just before primetime coverage started on the networks with actor Clint Eastwood's speech.
Eastwood addressed an empty chair as "Mr. Obama" and gave a rambling speech almost twice as long as the time he was allotted. The Hollywood icon's speech took place right before Sen. Marco Rubio's (R-Fla.) introduction of Romney.
"I love Clint Eastwood, he's a great filmmaker," Axelrod said. "I'm sure in retrospect they would have rather run the film than the filmmaker."
Ann Romney told ABC News on Friday morning that she "was grateful for [Eastwood's] support" and the Romney campaign told reporters following the speech that the crowd enjoyed the actor's "ad-libbing" as "a break from the political speech-making."
Axelrod went on to say it's his "personal goal" that the media not be sitting around dissecting Obama's acceptance of the Democratic nomination set for next Thursday in "quite" the same way they were Romney's evening. He said that would be "a bad reflection" on the production.
