Lies, Mitt Romney — July 16, 2012 at 6:21 am

#retroactively is the new Etch-A-Sketch – the Romney campaign takes flip-flopping to a new place

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I will gladly change my position Tuesday on an opinion I have today

Back in March, Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom made it clear that Mitt Romney was willing to reset his position at any given time, just like shaking an Etch-A-Sketch.

Appearing on CNN this morning, Romney Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom was asked if he’s concerned that Romney may alienate general election voters with some of the hard-right positions he’s taken during the primary to appeal to conservatives. Fehrnstrom brushed this concern off:

HOST: Is there a concern that Santorum and Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election.

FEHRNSTROM: 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 restart all of over again.

Over the weekend, another Romney adviser, Ed Gillespie, made it even more clear that this concept also goes for anything at all that Mitt Romney has ever done, including when he retired from Bain Capital.

DAVID GREGORY: He was still financially linked to Bain. And of course, a lot his fortune is due to his time with Bain. Even when he was on leave, does he stand by the business decisions that were made by the firm he created?

ED GILLESPIE: He actually retired retroactively at that point. He ended up not going back to the firm after his time in Salt Lake City. So he was actually retired from Bain.

This is uncharted territory, kids. The ability to say that nothing that happened for three years of your life counts because you retroactively were uninvolved? That’s positively brilliant. Hell, it doesn’t even require the invention and use of a time machine.

David Walden (aka Kagro X) from Daily Kos created the #retroactively hashtag on twitter and it has been trending since then.

Here’s a few fun ones:

But, on a serious note, Mitt Romney’s campaign is in complete crisis mode and it’s clear that they haven’t got a clue how to turn this around. Over the weekend, there was yet another devastating article about Romney’s time at Bain Capital, this one from Bloomberg titled “Romney’s Bain Yielded Private Gains, Socialized Losses”, whose title tells the tale:

Mitt Romney touts his business acumen and job-creation record as a key qualification for being the next U.S. president.

What’s clear from a review of the public record during his management of the private-equity firm Bain Capital from 1985 to 1999 is that Romney was fabulously successful in generating high returns for its investors. He did so, in large part, through heavy use of tax-deductible debt, usually to finance outsized dividends for the firm’s partners and investors. When some of the investments went bad, workers and creditors felt most of the pain. Romney privatized the gains and socialized the losses.

As the Obama campaign so perfectly points out in their video “Firms”, Mitt Romney not the solution to our country’s problems, Mitt Romney IS is the problem.

It’s very difficult to convince the American voters that you were responsible only for the good things that your company did, whether it’s before or after you left, and are in no way culpable for the bad things they did, things that destroyed American companies, put Americans out of work, and filled Romney’s bank account.

If Mitt Romney wasn’t in charge at Bain Capital from 1999 to 2001, it would be interesting to know who was. It would be very interesting to get that person in front of a camera and microphone and ask them how they feel about being completely thrown under the bus by Mitt Romney. Because, unlike Mitt, they can’t just #retroactively quit.

Or can they…?

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Avatar photo Author: Chris Savage is the owner and publisher of Eclectablog and the co-host of The GOTMFV Show podcast.
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