THE US Republican nomination race has not been short of foot-in-the-mouth moments. Candidates from Rick Perry to Newt Gingrich have vied with each other in turn to alienate key sections of their own potential electorate. And former governor Mitt Romney has made his own baggage too. There’s the story of his Irish setter, Seamus, travelling on a 12-hour drive from Massachusetts on the roof of the Romney car. Or the hard-nosed businessman’s “I like to fire people”. Or the confession on his I’m-just-an-ordinary-guy visit to the Daytona Nascar track that while he did not know any racers “I have some great friends who are Nascar team owners”.
But now a real doozy from his team, what one commentator has called “one of the worst gaffes in political history”, almost exquisitely painful precisely because it is so true. Yet the man involved, top adviser Eric Fehrnstrom remains on the team.
Romney’s principal challenge has been to give the lie to the line that he is all things to all men, a weather-vane candidate whose current conservative stripe is one of convenience, at odds with his moderate record, and one he will discard at the drop of a hat. Not the easiest of sells while also trying to claim that he is the candidate best able to beat President Obama because of his appeal to the centre ground. Squaring that circle with brutal honesty, Fehrnstrom told CNN that the political U-turn for the Obama phase of the campaign would be no problem. “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.” (The child’s toy is a portable screen on which drawings are erased with a vigorous shake).
Oops. As Leslie Savan of the Nation magazine put it, not only may he have scuppered his boss but has produced “a powerful new metaphor for electoral pandering . . . ‘Flip-flop’ is exhausted, ‘two-faced’ is even duller – but an Etch-a-Sketch is visual, it’s red, it’s a fun toy everyone knows, and you can hold it in your hands (it feels like a chunky prototype of the iPad).” It will also makes the inevitable U-turn all the more difficult.
Romney may take comfort from the reality that his supporters, unlike those of hardline conservative rivals, have nowhere else to go and are certainly less fickle. He is not expected anyway to win heavily evangelical Louisiana today, where Rick Santorum is polling comfortably ahead. But Fehrnstrom’s unfortunate moment of truth will not shake off as easily as an Etch-a-Sketch image.