The New York Times wrote:By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: March 14, 2012
Having fizzled once again in the South, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is testing one of the enduring tenets of the American political system: winning doesn’t always matter.
After victories by Rick Santorum in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, the campaigns were focusing on the next set of contests — Puerto Rico, Missouri and Illinois — in what promises to be a grinding effort to woo Republican voters for months to come.
But despite the millions of dollars that Mr. Romney and his allies continue to spend to try to emerge victorious in those contests, his campaign now increasingly argues that the outcomes are not the only things that matter. Their premise: Mr. Romney can — and will — win even while losing.
“Tuesday’s results actually increased Governor Romney’s delegate lead, while his opponents only moved closer to their date of mathematical elimination,” Rich Beeson, the campaign’s political director, argued in a strategy memorandum on Wednesday.