Romney: When a gaffe can’t be erased

last updated 8 January 2015

Remember when presidential candidate John Kerry protested in 2004 that he voted to fund the Iraq War “before I voted against it”? asked Joe Klein in Time.com. That comment haunted the rest of Kerry’s losing campaign, because it perfectly illustrated what an opportunist flip-flopper he was. Republican Mitt Romney now faces a similar, “campaign-defining disaster”—his top aide’s “Etch A Sketch” gaffe. Asked if Romney had gone too far to the right in the primaries to win moderate voters in the general election, chief aide Eric Fehrnstrom said last week: “You hit a reset button for the fall campaign. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.” That comment “sums up every single worry about Romney in one metaphor,” said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com. Here is a presidential candidate who has erased his liberal positions on abortion, gun control, gay rights, and climate change, to remake himself as a hard-right conservative. Romney, we’ve been reminded, is “a machine that can say or stand for anything.”

But we already knew that, said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. Romney’s opponents already have a voluminous “library of damaging clips and statements” documenting his 180-degree reversal on a host of issues. So I doubt the Etch A Sketch meme will do much new damage. Romney’s only real mistake here was in letting Fehrnstrom talk to reporters, said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com. Like a lot of aides, Fehrnstrom was foolish enough to read the campaign’s “stage direction” aloud. But voters aren’t naïve. They know that President Obama “has been running for president as a fake centrist for two years now.” The only question is, Who’s the bigger phony?

Such cynicism is deeply troubling, said William Kristol in WeeklyStandard.com. Yes, politics requires a certain amount of messaging and spin, but in a healthy country, “politics isn’t simply a game.” The nation’s $15 trillion debt, the difficult budget decisions ahead, Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon—“you can’t Etch A Sketch that reality away.” Now that it’s clear Romney will be the nominee, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, he needs to stop playing Etch A Sketch politics, and prove to people he has a real philosophy of governing. If the answer to the question, “Why do you want to be president?” is that “I’m a great fellow and it’s the top job,” he isn’t going to win.