BUT WOULDN'T REDUCING THE NUMBER OF UP-CLOSE ROMNEY MOMENTS ACTUALLY HELP HIM?

Mitt Romney now has Secret Service protection, and The New York Times argues that this could be a problem for him:

The most important side effect will be on Mr. Romney's interaction with supporters, whose access to the candidate at events is likely to be inversely proportional to the number of agents assigned to him.

Reid Cherlin, a GQ contributor who is covering the Republican primaries, worked on both President Obama's campaign and in his White House, and said that having a Secret Service detail "complicates things" for everyone involved.

"Especially in retail-focused states, all of a sudden roads are closed, there are traffic jams, people can't get close to the candidate, the local press feels mishandled," he said. "So there you are cruising down a two-lane blacktop in a tiny town at 80 miles per hour in these black S.U.V.'s. It can be a fun spectacle in a bigger city, but in tiny towns where people want to meet the candidate, it can be a problem."

... For a politician like Mr. Romney, who is remarkably disciplined in public and rarely mixes up his stump speech, those moments on the rope line offer brief glimpses into an impromptu and unscripted version of the candidate. It was on the rope line that we learned about his penchant for guessing voters' ages and heritage -- often incorrectly.... All of those moments will become more difficult to see and hear as the security buffer around him expands.

See, that's why this could be a good thing for Romney. He obviously has a formidable campaign machine ... in which he's the loose cog. The fewer spontaneous moments he has, the fewer chances he's going to have to embarrass himself, and the better it's going to be for him. And the more motorcades he has, the more he's going to look like Presidential GOP Daddy.

On the other hand, he could be the first presidential candidate to seem more robotic than his Secret Service detail. So there's that.