Katie Packer Gage, deputy campaign manager for the Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, spoke to a Milwaukee group assembled by <a href=\"http://www.wispolitics.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Wispolitics.com</a> on Wednesday, and dodged any question that required a substantive answer. <br /><br />Gage told the crowd that she wasn\'t a policy expert. <br /><br />She wasn\'t kidding. <br /><br />Still, she took questions from the audience and moderator Jeff Mayers, like:<br /><br /><em>Who will Mitt Romney select for his running mate?</em><br /><br />She doesn\'t know. She doesn\'t have any special insight. (I\'ll give her that one. She\'s not going to break major news at a lunch in Milwaukee.)<br /><br /><em>What about Romney\'s taxes? When will he release more returns? </em><br /><br />You won\'t get that information, either, because it turns out that Mitt meets with regular folks every day, Gage said, and “not one time has anyone asked him to release his returns.” The Romney folks decided that releasing two years of returns was “sufficient.” They\'ve only released one full year since, of course, Romney hasn\'t filed last year\'s taxes yet. (So I guess we\'ll never know if Romney ever got a refund, where his money is stashed, or how he wound up with $100,000 in his IRA.)<br /><br />“We\'re not going to play this game,” Gage said of the Obama campaign\'s calls for Romney to release his returns. (Conveniently ignoring the fact that several prominent Republicans and conservativesRon Paul, George Will, Bill Kristol, Michael Steele, the editors of The National Review and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour among themare requesting that the Republican nominee release more returns.)<br /><br /><em>How\'s Romney going to win Wisconsin when he\'s trailing President Obama in the polls by <a href=\"http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/wi/wisconsin_romney_vs_obama-1871.html\" target=\"_blank\">7 points</a>?</em><br /><br />Well, Gage said, "I think that\'s about the same margin that Scott Walker won by and all of the polls showed his race being very, very tight leading up to that election as well." (Huh?)<br /><br /><em>What about all of the negative campaigning? Isn\'t Romney worried that the criticism of Bain Capital by Newt Gingrich (and others) will hurt him?</em><br /><br />Newt saw the errors of his criticism and stopped, Gage said. Romney had his "big boy" pants on and had expected the criticism. She then went negative on Obama and his “you didn\'t build that” comment. They played the tape back and he really did say it, she said. <br /><br />(Here\'s what Obama said: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you\'ve got a businessyou didn\'t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn\'t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don\'t do on our own.”)<br /><em><br />What about the complaint that Romney doesn\'t provide any details about his plans for the nation?</em><br /><br />Gage said that Romney had released a 59-point jobs plan, which couldn\'t be distilled into a simple three-point plan. <br /><br />OK, OK, if you\'re really curious, you can go online and watch the TV ads that the Romney campaign is airing in North Carolina and Virginia, Gage said.<br /><br /><em>Why doesn\'t Romney talk more about his success with the Salt Lake City Olympics?</em><br /><br />It\'s a great story, Gage said, and recounted a bit of it, but she explained that the campaign can only tell so many stories at once. Watch TV, Gage said, because there will be lots of Romney interviews about the Olympics in the coming days.<br /><br /><em>What about Romney\'s plans to repeal and replace “Obamacare”?</em><br /><br />Again, Gage said, she\'s not a policy expert and there\'s information on his website. But she said that Romney believes that health care reform should be done at the state level, with the federal government in the background. She said he wanted to protect those with pre-existing conditions and allow people to keep their insurance coverage if they change jobs. (How is this any different from Obamacare? Hm.) But the law needs to be repealed because it\'s a “job killer.”<br /><br /><em>Will Romney win Wisconsin?</em><br /><br />You betcha. The campaign has set up 25 victory centers around the state, a “very aggressive footprint.” She said that the campaign is very careful with their money and doesn\'t spend cash in states that they don\'t target. That said, she acknowledged that other states are swingier than Wisconsin, like North Carolina, Virginia and Indiana. “We really need to get those in our fold,” she said. Florida, too. And Michigan and Pennsylvania and other pick-up options. And then there\'s Wisconsin, with Romney trailing by 7 points.<br /><br />So that\'s her story. I guess she\'s sticking with it, whatever it is.<br /><br />
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