It's been a rough week for the Romney campaign, with more videos from the not-too-distant past showing him passionately declaiming his belief in "a woman's right to choose," and making his professed conversion to a pro-life position ever harder to swallow, and even his campaign's new "life adviser," the respected James Bopp, isn't quite sure about Romney's true belief. A staff attack on McCain's pro-life record only focused more attention on Mitt's.

Kathryn Lopez bemoans the week at NRO:

It's been one helluva week for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney among the chatterers (both the pajama-clad and the Capital Grille-frequenting variety). The Washington Post has had not one but two hit columns this week (as NRO did on Friday) going through his past and present positions. The Boston Globe Presidents' Day Weekend reporting that this man who wants to be president joined the National Rifle Association only last August sounded so silly it resembled a joke Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" would pile on with.

Are these way too many hits for one candidate, and so early? Is Romney 2008 over? Far from. But it certainly sounded that way listening to Bill Bennett on his radio talk show, Morning in America, Wednesday morning.

Then she quotes Larry Sabato:

"Abortion is certainly not the key to overcoming McCain -- for Romney or anyone else," Sabato says. "McCain's vulnerabilities are his maverick status, his age, and positions on other issues (even an arcane one, campaign finance). A lot of Republicans just don't trust McCain; they don't think they know what he'll actually do once in office. With all of Romney's flip-flopping, maybe the same thing can be said for him, although Romney has that puppy-dog quality that emanates sincerity."

Read the whole article at the preceding link. Sabato offers "encouragement" to Romney - by comparing him to a puppy? It has NOT been a good week.

Undaunted, however, remains Dean Barnett, Red Sox and Romney fan, who blogs with Hugh Hewitt at Townhall.com:

The press and other entities who are hostile to the Romney campaign feel like they're landing haymakers about his purported flip-flopping. Big deal. When the press is all punched out, Romney will have $100 million and his own formidable political skills available to make his rebuttal.

The problem with going on the same offensive repeatedly in politics, as Romney's foes are, is that regardless of the offensive's underlying merits, there are diminishing returns. Republicans learned this the hard way with bill Clinton. After spending 7 years decrying Clinton's moral turpitude, the then-President was caught in the Oval Office with his pants down canoodling with a zaftig intern. For any other president in American history, this would have been game, set and match. The public would have demanded his resignation.

But Clinton was fortunate. Because his political enemies had spent seven years attacking his moral shortcomings and sexual peccadilloes, the country had tuned out such matters. Even though smart guys like Dike Morris (giggle) thought the Lewinsky scandal would be a knockout blow to the president he so loyally served, it never even perceptibly moved public opinion regarding the randy POTUS.

Read it all at the link above. Dean might be stretching by comparing Romney to Ali, but in a year with Obama comparing himself to Lincoln, it seems a minor offense.

The real answer for Romney isn't his personal ability to withstand the heat OR the receding effect of repeated charges. It's in the donors. Will the people who give the max to campaigns continue writing him checks after he's been roughed up a bit? If so, he'll survive this without much problem, and be able to take his case directly to the Republican voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. If the money dries up, though, he's finished.