Did the Romney Campaign attempt to be , shall we say, a wee bit cheeky, during a Rules Committee Meeting for upcoming Conventions, last Friday?

Businessinsider.com has the report:

The GOP convention doesn’t officially start until Monday, but trouble is already brewing between presumptive nominee Mitt Romney and Republicans who are concerned by his campaign making an aggressive power play to control the party.

The drama Friday centered around a contentious meeting of the powerful Rules Committee, where Romney’s campaign lieutenants, led by his legal counsel Ben Ginsberg, pushed through several changes that would give Romney broad authority over the Republican nominating process.

According to one source who was at the meeting, the saga ended with former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, the committee chair, hightailing it out of the building before committee members could submit dissenting minority opinions, or “minority reports.”

In an interview with Business Insider Friday night, Maine’s newly-elected state committeewoman Ashley Ryan, said that committee members opposed to Romney’s plan drafted two minority reports immediately after the meeting, stating their position against the changes. Republican Party rules stipulate that people have one hour to submit a minority report after a meeting of the Rules Committee, and that it must have the support of at least 25 percent of the committee.

“The rules say that you have an hour after the meeting, but within 15 minutes, we couldn’t find [Chairman Sununu] anywhere,” Ryan, a Ron Paul supporter and member of Maine’s delegation, said. “Finally, we asked an RNC official if they had seen former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu. He said, ‘John Sununu! Everyone’s looking for him! But he left the building.'”

The details around Sununu’s Friday dip are still foggy, and it’s unclear if he ended up receiving the minority reports after all. Convention officials have not yet responded to our email asking for comment.

Earlier on Friday, Ginsberg and other Romney loyalists tried to neuter the threat of a minority report by raising the threshold of support to 40 percent.

BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that the attempt was forcefully shot down as overreach, even by committee members who voted for Ginsberg’s other proposals, including one that would force states to select delegates based on the results of their primary or caucus, and one that would allow the Republican National Committee to change the rules established at the convention.

“It’s important to make the rules four years in advance, before we know who the favorites are,” Ryan said. “If the national party can just change the rules, what’s the point of having a Rules Committee at all?

Indeed. On top of that, even though we all know that America has to fire our Manchurian President, a lot of us are still not all that thrilled over the GOP Establishment’s choice, as foxnews.com explains:

No matter when the Republican National Convention officially starts, it still marks perhaps the best chance for party leaders to ratchet up what has until now been bridled enthusiasm for Mitt Romney — as he and President Obama compete for the last of the undecided voters in a very tight race.

The balloons and confetti are set to cascade inside the Tampa Times Forum when Romney accepts the nomination, as planned. And party leaders have assembled Romney’s most ardent and passionate supporters to make their case on stage about why Romney is the best choice in November to lead the country.

“This is a huge opportunity to capture the attention of the American public and keep them focused for several nights,” said Juleanna Glover, a Republican strategist and co-founder of the Washington-based Ashcroft Group.

The biggest threat to that undivided attention will almost certainly be Tropical Storm Isaac, which has already postponed the election start from Monday to Tuesday and is projected to make landfall later this week along the northern Gulf Coast states.

Glover suggested the challenge for the Romney team will be to refrain from trying to re-invent the candidate or going over the top, instead generating enthusiasm through trying to reinforce that Romney is a leader, a church-goer and a family man.

Their biggest challenge may well be in convincing Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and private-equity manager who through the entire election cycle has argued his mission is to fix the economy not win a popularity contest.

The mantra even wore off on some of the Republican Party’s most influential leaders, including House Speaker John Boehner, who in July said: “The American people probably aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney.”

Boehner also said Romney, who founded the Bain Capital private equity firm, “was going to do a great job even if you don’t fall in love with him.” But the perception was already largely in place and has, at times, remained there.

Just last week, Romney vowed in The Wall Street Journal that he won’t be part of the celebrity-style culture often favored by politicians.

Voters, Romney suggested, are most interested in hiring a fix-it specialist for an ailing economy. And when he appeared before crowds at campaign stops, he doesn’t think, “What can I do here to portray myself in a way that would be appealing to the public?” Romney told the paper.

Romney’s favorability rating is now at 46 percent, according to an averaging of polls by the Real Clear Politics website. It was as low as 21 percent according to a CBS-New York Times poll in January and as high as 50 percent according to a CNN-Opinion Research poll this month.

If  Romney would act more like the fella appearing in front of his hometown crowd on Friday, cracking a joke about his birth certificate, and embrace Reagan Conservatives, instead of marginalizing us, that would certainly help his popularity numbers.

I’m just sayin’…