To put it delicately, the Romney campaign has not been doing a very good job so far of managing crises. Since the Boston Globe story broke yesterday about a discrepancy in Romney's claims about when he left Bain Capital, they've responded with a fractured series of half-measures. First, the Romney campaign demanded that the Globe run an apology, even though they didn't dispute any of the Globe's facts.

Today, the Romney campaign published an ad that basically claims these attacks are all unfair and that Obama is being mean by pushing them:

It sounds like a whole lot of whining to me, and it's especially unfortunate that the ad brings up the outsourcing claims that are right now central to this Bain story. (If the Globe's new story is correct, those outsourcing charges are even more relevant than they were a week ago.)

There's a third, weirder angle to the Romney campaign's response, though: Last night, the Drudge Report ran a story suggesting that Condoleezza Rice was being considered for Romney's vice president, which immediately sent Twitter off into a, well, twitter. Now, it's generally thought that the Romney campaign leaked the Rice story to Drudge to get the heat off of this Bain story. If that's true, it was a callous, cynical attempt to exploit the teeny-weeny attention span of the American people, and it didn't work.

So my questions are: When will the Romney campaign put together a real response? And is the Republican Party panicking at seeing the shoddy blunderbuss-style response to this crisis? News is breaking that Romney is doing sit-downs with most of the major news networks today. Will this be enough? Why has it taken so long for the Romney campaign to put together a response? Did they really not see this coming? Romney is famous for being loyal to his campaign team, but at some point the larger party is going to have to step in and force a little more of a national-scale level of preparedness into Romney's people. They've been doing abysmally so far.