WASHINGTON – A senior advisor to Mitt Romney recently admitted on CNN that Romney’s positions on an array of issues are akin to an Etch A Sketch, and that the beginning of the general election campaign was a clean slate for the candidate. The advisor made the remarks when asked whether Romney had moved too far to the right to remain palatable to moderate voters:
“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,” said Romney senior Advisor Eric Fehrnstrom.
“Mitt Romney’s top campaign officials are now saying what we’ve known to be true for so long,” said HRC President Joe Solmonese. “Mitt Romney is a candidate who is not guided by any principles or beliefs, but rather by spouting whatever rhetoric he believes will get him elected. He has proven time and again that LGBT Americans cannot trust him, and now his top advisors are giving credence to those concerns.”
It did not take long for Romney’s opponents to take advantage of the comment. NPR’s Ari Shapiro said both Santorum and Gingrich brought Etch A Sketches on the campaign trail the next day.
“Gingrich actually handed his Etch A Sketch to a kid in the front row and said, ‘Now you can be a presidential candidate,’” Ari reported for All Things Considered.
Romney has flip-flopped on a wide array of issues, but particularly those pertaining to LGBT equality. In 1994, he vowed to co-sponsor a federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) should he win a seat in the U.S. Senate; but by the time he was seeking the GOP presidential nomination in 2007 he no longer supported a federal ENDA. In the 1990s, he supported open service for gay and lesbian servicemembers – but when it came time to support the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2010, Romney felt the policy was working just fine.
