-- Brian Reardon, a tax and budget policy adviser in the Bush White House who helped put together the president's 2003 plan to accelerate the tax cuts. He is now an economic consultant.

Weber is still in the process of building not only a hefty team but one that demonstrates Romney is attracting a prominent field of advisers around him who are committed Reagan supply-siders.

Arizona Sen. John McCain has former Texas senator Phil Gramm and a few others advising him, though he still has to explain why he was one of only two Republican senators to vote against all of the Bush tax-rate cuts. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has not put together his economic team, though none of his campaign advisers are people who rallied to the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s.

In his Detroit address on the economy, Romney went beyond the need to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, hinting strongly the income tax rates need to be further reduced.

"We need reform of our tax code. We need to move it toward a system that's encouraging of growth, fairness and simplicity," he said. That's a powerful economic message to America's taxpayers, burdened by a costly, inefficient tax code that is incomprehensible to workers and businesses that labor under its yoke.

Romney's presidential campaign faces many daunting challenges in the months to come and remains far behind front-runners Giuliani and McCain, largely because he is still not that well-known.

But his CPAC speech here, where he won the straw poll from the often hard-to-please conservative activists who heard him, has given him new momentum and, thanks to C-SPAN, increased political visibility.

It remains to be seen whether he can revive Ronald Reagan's spirit of optimism and the belief that America still remains a land of opportunity if we stick to the free-market, low-tax, free-trade principles that have made the United States the most powerful economy on Earth.