Mitt Romney's strategist says Roy Moore's 'creepy' behavior with girls would've gotten him beat up in Mississippi

Give Alabama some credit, Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said on Thursday's Anderson Cooper 360. Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for Senate in next Tuesday's Alabama election, "by every measure has violated the decency standard," Stevens said. "I mean, he's admitted to trying to date 16-year-old girls in his 30s. That's a creepy thing. People say, well it's just Alabama. Listen, I grew up in Mississippi. And every father I knew, if he saw a guy like Roy Moore in his 30s trying to date his 16-year-old daughter, he would've had a date with a baseball bat."

Ed Martin, a fellow CNN panelist and author of a book called The Conservative Case for Trump, protested to Stevens, chief strategist for Mitt Romney (who has his own Moore issues) in the 2012 presidential race and a critic of President Trump, that none of the allegations against Moore came up in any of his previous political and judicial campaigns. Stevens had an answer for that, too. "I can tell you why it never came up," he said. "I did the [2006] campaign when Gov. [Bob] Riley [R] ran against Roy Moore, and we beat him two-to-one. The reason this didn't come up is because Roy Moore was out there saying such crazy stuff that you didn't need to look into his background."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up