Let me finish tonight with this.
Jack Kennedy once said he felt sorry for his presidential rival Dick Nixon because Nixon could never decide who he really was. On every public occasion, he had to decide how to present himself. In other words, which Nixon to be. Should he be the high-toned statesman or the rabid partisan? He always had to sweat that decision right there before the Klieg lights.
Now, fast forward to today and today’s presidential rivalry.
Imagine how hard it is being Mitt Romney. “Let’s see, which one am I supposed to be today? Am I the Tea Party champion, the hater of Obamacare, the crusader bent on tearing into the Nation’s Capitol and tearing down everything Obama built, starting with that terrible health care plan based on…Oh, oh..based on my health care plan in Massachusetts…?”
You see the problem?
But if it’s hard being the candidate who at least gets to call the shots day to day, imagine trying to be a spokesperson for this guy. How would Andrea Saul know how much trouble she’d get into by saying what she just did about that man in the latest Obama ad who lost his wife to cancer after getting fired in a Bain Capital operation? “To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care.”Didja hear that? That that poor fellow’s wife might be alive today if the whole country had what Mitt built in Massachusetts; that presumably the country would be better off if it took the lead from what Romney had done. How was Ms. Saul to know that it’s not right to say what Romney, the candidate, said years ago before he was a candidate: that the country should take Massachusetts as a model when it comes to health care? How could she know that such a public admission is, in the words of a late Nixon spokesman, “inoperative.” So what a day this has been — the day that we can salute the Romney team in the person of Andrea Saul for saying what we’ve been saying for a year: that the “Mitt Romney” that Mitt Romney is selling out there is not the Mitt Romney his own chief spokesperson is now admitting to be the very same Mitt Romney who governed Massachusetts and did what his new friends keep telling themselves he should never have done, which just happens to be something he should be bragging about — not hiding under bed.
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