But Romney has invested the bulk of what is any campaign’s main resource — the candidate’s time — in the race for cash. He’s put to use a skill set honed in a career spent asking rich people for money for three major causes. And he’s shadowed by the failure of his predecessor, John McCain, to keep pace with Obama…

Romney also has a depth of fundraising experience often neglected in recounting his biography as a private equity titan and Olympic Committee. Both of those posts are, at their core, about asking for money from wealthy people, and Romney by all accounts excelled at both.

The post of Bain Capital chief executive “was a fundraising job in the sense that a lot of what Romney did was, all the way through his tenure there, was to go out and pitch the various funds that Bain Capital put together to potential investors, both institutions and individuals,” said Walter Keichel, the author of The Lords of Strategy, a detailed study of Bain Consulting and other firms.