MITT ROMNEY’S 12-point victory in the Illinois primary on Tuesday night has been marred by a colossal gaffe from his top campaign adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom.
He confirmed the Republican frontrunner’s plan to simply erase the conservative positions he has taken during the nomination process when he faces President Barack Obama.
A CNN anchor asked Mr Fehrnstrom: “Is there a concern that [Rick] Santorum and [Newt] Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election?”
Mr Fehrnstrom has worked for Mr Romney for 10 years. He specialises in dirty tricks, for example tweeting insulting messages under a fake name to help Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, for whom he also works, and delving into Mr Gingrich’s finances so that Mr Romney was able to challenge him in a debate with the words: “Have you checked your own investments?”
So it was difficult to understand how Mr Fehrnstrom revealed such a damaging truth on live television. “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall [autumn] campaign,” he answered. “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”
Invented by a French electrician in the late 1950s, the red-edged rectangular Etch A Sketch toy is familiar to every American. Two knobs etch a drawing in aluminium dust on the back of a plexiglass screen. The drawing is erased by shaking the slate. In four sentences, Mr Fehrnstrom rebranded Mr Romney “the Etch A Sketch candidate”.
“It takes copious pages of ink to explain the extent of Romney’s hypocrisy on the issue of healthcare alone,” wrote the conservative blogger Daniel Horowitz. “We have finally discovered our symbol that exemplifies Romney.”
On the campaign trail in Louisiana, which holds its primary on Saturday, Rick Santorum posed for a photograph with an Etch A Sketch. “@RickSantorum studying up on @MittRomney policy positions” his campaign tweeted.
“You take whatever he said and you can shake it up and it will be gone and he’s going to draw a whole new picture for the general election,” Mr Santorum told a rally. Newt Gingrich posted his own tweet: “Etch A Sketch is a great toy but a losing strategy”.
The Democratic National Committee sent out mocking emails hourly, including videos of Mr Romney projected on an Etch A Sketch screen.
Mr Santorum’s top adviser Alice Stewart showed up in the car park of the American Legion Hall in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, where Mr Romney spoke on Wednesday night, to distribute pocket-sized Etch A Sketches. “Conservative principles should be written in stone, not on Etch A Sketches,” Ms Stewart told journalists.
Mr Romney dodged a barrage of Etch A Sketch questions as he went into the rally. As he left, he made a feeble attempt to recast Mr Fehrnstrom’s comment and assert his own conservatism.
“Organisationally, a general election campaign takes on a different profile,” he said. “The issues I’m running on will be exactly the same. I’m running as a conservative Republican, I was a conservative Republican governor, I’ll be running as a conservative Republican nominee.”
The day had started so well for Mr Romney. Not only had he won Illinois, but the moderate and conservative branches of the Republican Party seemed to coalesce around his candidacy.
Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, endorsed him. The vice-president of FreedomWorks, a large Tea Party organisation that had criticised him, told the Washington Times that “the numbers favour Mitt Romney” and the group would no longer oppose him.
Mr Romney tweeted: “March 21 is turning into a pretty big day.”
Earlier Romney primary victories were also tainted by gaffes.
In New Hampshire, he refused to release his tax returns as he said several hundred thousand dollars he was paid for speaking engagements was “not very much”. The morning after his Florida victory, he said he was “not concerned about the very poor”.
Ohio Arts, the company that makes Etch A Sketch, told USA Today it was considering a promotion to take advantage of the publicity windfall.
