Distraction unfurls as Romney opens tour

MILFORD, N.H. – Like buzzing flies, two small planes with trailing banners circled overhead in the blue sky above Mitt Romney as he launched a five-day tour of small-town America at a New Hampshire farm.

The hostile plane – “Romney’s Every Millionaire Counts Tour,” its red banner screamed – seemed to be chasing the friendly one with a more mundane red banner: “Romney for President 2012.”

For a campaign that recoils from all things spontaneous, it was a rare distraction at the opening event of Romney’s swing through some of the less populous (and more Republican) regions of the presidential battleground states.

It was also fitting on a day when President Barack Obama overshadowed Romney’s message with his announcement that the administration would stop deporting many illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children.

After making his statement on immigration, Romney refused to take questions, in keeping with his campaign’s meticulous staging of the events that opened his tour, which will also take him to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan.

Romney’s first stop, in Stratham, was at a picturesque farm in the green rolling hills of southern New Hampshire.

His ad team deployed six cameras to record the rally for TV commercials. A giant arc light, hoisted on a scissor lift, enhanced the sunlight. On the roof of a white barn behind the stage, a blue banner bore the Romney tour’s slogan, “Every Town Counts.”

Along with his boilerplate attacks on Obama’s economic record, Romney paid tribute to America’s farms and churches, along with some presidents who grew up in small towns – Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

Borrowing a campaign staple of Reagan’s, Romney also took aim at welfare.

“Poverty will be defeated not with a government check, but with respect and achievement that’s taught by parents, learned in school and practiced in the workplace,” he said.