The debates are too late for Romney

Markos Moulitsas wrote a nice post on how narrative works in presidential campaigns, using Romney as an example:

From Day 1, all of Mitt Romney's foes had a clear narrative about him—he was a callous, heartless, elitist, vulture capitalist. In other words, "a dick." 

The stage was set by Occupy with their "99 percent" narrative, which allowed Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich to get mileage with their "vulture capitalist" attacks against Romney before the party establishment shut them down.
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And why is that narrative important? Because as people become aware of such narratives, they then try to decide whether it's legit. If you can reinforce a negative narrative, you're winning.

The first step in changing the trajectory of a campaign is to lay out a new narrative, a narrative that can reinforce people's preconceptions (Alinsky's rule number 2: "Never go outside the experience of your people.") but work to your advantage. When people talk about the debates as Romney's last chance to turn this around they are referring to the way debates can be key to communicating a narrative. As Paul Waldman points out, a debate can turn an underlying critique into an open criticism that explains the whole campaign:

what happened was that reporters decided those were the key moments, and kept writing and talking about them in the subsequent days and weeks. Not coincidentally, the moments that get chosen are those that reinforce the conclusions the press has already come to about a candidate's character weaknesses.

The first debate is scheduled for October 3rd, just under a week away. Romney has not settled on a narrative for Obama, or even for his own campaign:

While Obama doles out his sustained-applause lines freely, Romney is still honing his message. The GOP nominee has rolled out tougher rhetoric on China as a currency manipulator in recent days in order to tug at Ohioans who have been hit by outsourced jobs. He also speaks in front of a tally board that features the historic level of national indebtedness.

Romney is not building any coherent narrative this week, he has nothing to build on next Wednesday. He's still auditioning new lines of attack. With nothing to build on, he has no chance to use the debates to change anything about the election.