Sununu says attacks not rattling Romney

HAMPTON FALLS, N.H. — Escalating attacks by Mitt Romney’s rivals have done little to knock him off his game, former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu said Sunday in an interview with The Hill.

Sununu, a vocal supporter of Romney and frequent campaign surrogate, said Romney and his team inherently understood that campaigns are won not by doing the most things right, but by doing the fewest things wrong. As a result, he’s avoided getting rattled by his opponents — even as they step up their attacks on the front-running candidate.

{mosads}“I think he has a pebble in his shoe,” Sununu joked. “Every time he gets attacked, he steps on it to remind himself.”

Sununu said Romney’s criticism of Jon Huntsman’s service in China under President Obama, which Huntsman has rejected, was fair and appropriate because it called attention to liberal policies possessed by Obama that Huntsman, as his ambassador, had to embrace.

“If anybody Googles ‘Obama Huntsman letters’ they’ll see the most fawning letters written by Huntsman to President Obama praising his leadership and his policies and his approach,” said Sununu, speaking in his sprawling Hampton Falls, N.H., home.

The former New Hampshire governor also made clear his frustration with a Republican National Committee decision to assign delegates from states that vote early on a proportional basis, instead of winner-takes-all.

“It was a packaged decision, with the aspect of keeping Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina as the first states,” Sununu said. “I would have preferred it not be proportional, but in order to preserve the first-in-the-nation status of New Hampshire, I reluctantly urged people to vote for the package.”

Asked if the proportional distribution would help or hurt his candidate of choice, Sununu said there was little doubt it would have an effect.

“Yes,” he said. “But we don’t know which.”