Politico dismisses its own story on Romney campaign: 'Doesn't matter

At the start of the week Politico's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei broke a story detailing the inner turmoil of the Romney campaign. The story was long and honed in on chief strategist Stuart Stevens who's essentially running the show, though by several accounts, ineffectively.

Politico's scoop was the talk of the town for most of Monday and it spread to several other news publications (we covered it).

Today, at the tail end of the week, Allen and VandeHei have another story on the Romney campaign, this time detailing its strategy going forward after a week of bad press. Oddly, this one dismisses the last one (while still hyping up the attention it got).

Under the subtitle "WHAT DOESN'T MATTER," Allen and VandHei write:

The POLITICO story we wrote about staff turmoil on Sunday night, which generated nearly 3 million page views, making it one of the most-read stories in our publication’s history. The story spoke in important ways to the internal issues Romney faces — but his challenges for the next six weeks are all external. He has no interest in a staff shake-up — and knows the key to pulling out of this turbulence and onto a path to victory is clarity of message. Sure, advisers such as Ed Gillespie emerge with a greater say in that message, but the former Bush counselor always had juice and a big say internally. And as any Romney insider will tell you, Romney’s biggest problem the past two weeks has been Romney, not his staff.