Romney making hard push for Maine victory

Mitt Romney is touting his win in the CPAC straw poll as he continues his campaign push in the Maine caucuses. NBC’s Garrett Haake reports.

>> in with a couple others now, beginning with garrett hick, embedded with the romney campaign. how are you?

>> i'm good. how are you?

>> good. we know the sta3ihm for maine, which in any other plausible universep mh> given theo( sparseness of the state, there actually are some states insofar as the media narrative coming out of the tuesday night debacle with the paul campaign with not a single victory. there is probably a desire to have a headline tomorrow that does not like like the wednesday morning headlines.

>> that's right. first thing's first, don't believe the hype. the romney campaign has been saying they're in it to win. delegates, they don't feel compelled to compete in places like maine where the delegates aren't proportioned. it's more like a beauty contest kind of thing. this is a campaign that add -- first of all the event on friday night. a town hall event where they take some risk, open the candidate up, totally unscripted, taking questions from voters in a blue state . secondly, adding stops last minute. mitt romney didn't speak at a caucus in iowa where they were competing very hard to win. this morning he spoke at two. his oldest son was deployed to three other caucuses around the stated. a bunch of senior folks up from boston. they can't play this off like they weren't trying to win in had maine . this is one they want to have.

>> do you think that the campaign is going to get a lift out of the straw poll , the cpac today? again, at some point you say it's a straw poll , a conference. it has as many delegates as the voting in maine does tonight. every bit of momentum seems to count in terms of how fluid and shifting the conversation about the race has been. how much is the romney campaign touting what happened at cpac today?

>> funny that you ask that. i just landed about 30 minutes ago. i turned on my blackberry. the first thing in my inbox is an e-mail from the romney campaign pushing that victory. this is the people who were saying they weren't doing the iowa straw poll because they don't matter. they wanted to have this had. they needed to show something to the conservatives that, look, we are here to play. we can talk to these people. we are a conservative candidate.

>> thank, garrett.

>> my pleasure.