‘Etch A Sketch’ comment reveals truths both
pro and con for Mitt Romney - Political Intelligence - A
national political and campaign blog from The Boston Globe -
Boston.com
By Glen Johnson, Globe Staff
When Republican political consultant Eric Fehrnstrom said
that a general election matchup tends to create a clean
slate for candidates much like the shake of an Etch A
Sketch, he did nothing more than state an obvious truth that
applies to this fall’s campaign as it has others.
His boss, Mitt Romney, will be judged head-to-head versus a
lone opponent, President Obama, should he emerge as the GOP
nominee against the Democratic incumbent.
What Romney said while running against multiple members of
his own party during the primary and caucus season would not
have the same context as what he and Obama will say in their
convention speeches, fall debates, and general election
campaign stops - and when voters focus on the idea that just
one of them will be the person inaugurated as president next
January.
The Democrats’ immediate and expansive protestations about
the remark, some Republicans’ concerns or embarrassment over
it, and the subsequent rise in the toy maker’s stock price
glossed over this universal political truth: primaries are
one thing, general elections quite another.
But in the specific case of Romney, the Etch A Sketch
comment affirmed other basic truths about the candidate, his
staff, and the nature of the campaign they have run for the
nation’s highest office.
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about this issue. First, there appear to
be few core beliefs that bind Romney to any governing or
political philosophy.
This is a candidate who has had not one but two epiphanies
that led him to hold contradictory positions about abortion
rights during a 10-year span.
In 1994, while challenging Democratic incumbent Edward M.
Kennedy for the US Senate, Romney declared himself a
personal opponent of abortion but a political supporter of
abortion rights.
He made a heartfelt defense of his stance to skeptical
voters in heavily liberal Democratic Massachusetts by
relating the emotional tale of a family friend who died from
an illegal abortion, and by recalling his own mother’s
support for abortion rights.
Yet in a July 2005 op-ed column for the Globe, after having
been elected governor of Massachusetts but while beginning
to position himself nationally for his first presidential
run in 2008, Romney announced that he was vetoing a
contraception bill because he felt a drug it authorized
could be used to terminate life after conception.
He also cited information he had learned while studying
embryo cloning and embryo farming, saying a Harvard
scientist’s suggestion he allowed embryos to be
unceremoniously discarded contributed to anti-abortion views
that “have evolved and deepened during my time as governor.”
Never mind that the scientist disputed his recounting of
their conversation; Romney declared himself both personally
and politically opposed to abortion in all but cases of
rape, incest, or risk to the life of a mother.
Now, on the presidential campaign trail, he has also called
for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which he said in 1994 “should
be sustained and supported” and, in 2002, affirmed by saying
he would “preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose.”
He has had similar shifts in policy or emphasis when it
comes to gun rights, climate change, and gay rights, among
other things, earning him the label of a flip-flopper.
In a general election campaign against Obama, Romney will
accurately be able to highlight the president’s own
flip-flops – retaining after promising to close a detention
center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
comes to mind – but his own political malleability is
documentable.
His campaigns, whether for US Senate, Massachusetts
governor, or the presidency, have unfolded as if not steered
by convictions but dictated by scripts.
That leads to a second basic truth about Romney and his
staff: contrition is not part of their storyboard.
When Fehrnstrom’s remark became cable fodder, his boss was
only reluctantly drawn into the fray by answering one
question allowed to reporters at the end of a campaign
event.
Moments earlier, Romney had grabbed a reporter’s tape
recorder and declared that he was not holding a press
conference, emblematic of his campaign’s tight control over
public and media interaction.
“Organizationally, a general-election campaign takes on a
different profile,” Romney ultimately said. “Issues I’m
running on will be exactly the same.”
He added: “I’m running as a conservative Republican. I was
a conservative Republican governor. I’ll be running as a
conservative Republican nominee.”
Fehrnstrom, meanwhile, noted the boost in sales of Ohio
Arts, maker of the Etch A Sketch, by quipping: “I’ll mention
Mr. Potato Head next.”
That response recalled the occasion last summer when
Fehrnstrom was unmasked as the author of a veiled Twitter
feed that questioned the sanity, manliness, and political
views of a possible opponent of another of his clients,
Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts.
“Sometimes we take our politics too seriously, and this was
my way of lightening things up. As they say in politics, if
you can’t stand the tweet, get out of the kitchen,”
Fehrnstrom said after his own errant tweet outed him as
author of the “CrazyKhazei” feed in August.
An occasion to apologize instead became an opportunity to
launch another attack – this time suggesting his target
lacked the funnybone needed to see the humor in jokes
Fehrnstrom had only been willing to make anonymously.
Finally, the imagery Fehrnstrom inspired by evoking the
erasability of an Etch A Sketch screen hinted at the
campaign’s disregard for the permanence of its statements,
be they about the candidate’s past policies or the staff’s
treatment of its rivals.
Alec MacGillis of The New Republic recounted last week some
of the environmental views Romney harbored during his term
as governor.
In short, they were short on the current philosophy of
“drill, baby, drill” and long on green strategies such as
car-pooling, tax incentives for buying fuel-efficient
vehicles, and stronger vehicle emission standards.
“Befitting his profile as a moderate Republican who cared
about the environment, Governor Romney responded to price
spikes by describing them as the natural result of global
market pressures and by calling for increases in fuel
efficiency - the same approach that he now derides Obama for
taking as president,” MacGillis wrote.
Meanwhile, as Rick Santorum has mounted the most serious
challenge to Romney for the nomination, Romney and his staff
have taken to not just differentiating themselves from their
rival, but delighting in belittling the former Pennsylvania
senator in the process.
It has had the resonance of a race for class president, not
the highest office in the land.
“Rick Santorum: Economic Lightweight,” read the headline on
a press release issued by the Romney campaign last week.
“Economic Lightweight Takes One on the Chin,” read another.
The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, a onetime
speechwriter for conservative icon Ronald Reagan, chided
Romney for the pettiness of the label.
“Cheesy grits, jeans, singing, being compulsively pleasant,
calling your opponents lightweights - enough,” she wrote
this weekend as she called for more gravitas from the
purported frontrunner.
If history is any guide, though, Romney will embrace
Santorum if he should drop out of the race, just as he did
Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and
Jon Huntsman.
Shaking an Etch a Sketch may eliminate any trace of the
words or images scrawled on its screen, but not necessarily
the damage they did to the reputations of Romney and his
opponents beforehand.
Glen Johnson can be reached
at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter @globeglen.
