ROMNEY ADVISER WINKS AT PRESS; "GAFFE" MAKES ROMNEY A MUCH MORE DANGEROUS CANDIDATE

This is being called a gaffe, but I don't think so:

Top Romney Adviser Says Romney Can Change His Positions After The Primaries: 'It's Almost Like 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.

This is perfectly timed -- it comes precisely at the moment when Romney has sewn up the Republican nomination. It won't hurt him with Republicans, who are stuck with him; if they want to beat the person they think is the most evil man who ever lived, Barack Obama, he's all they've got.

Now Romney is preparing to finish off Rick Santorum with wins in states where Republicans are more moderate (New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, California). So this won't hurt him much in upcoming primaries -- he'll get plenty of votes sending the message that he's a right-centrist.

But then, after that, he has to win over low-information swing voters. How does he do that? Well, he gets the press to stop talking about him as if he's become one of those wingnut crazies, that's how (even though he has). As Greg Sargent points out, Fehrstrom spoke to a couple of CNN hosts and they didn't bat an eyelash:

Note how casually these remarks were greeted by the panel of commentators, as if his kind of thing is just business as usual. As I and others, such as Steve Benen, have been pointing out, it seems likely that many commentators will forget all about Romney's flirtation with far right positions and grant him the presumption of moderation the second he becomes the nominee. It will be widely accepted that Romney didn't really mean any of the things he said to get through the primary; all that silly stuff was just part of the game. The above foreshadows this perfectly.

Precisely. The press isn't going to treat this as a shameless flip-flop on the part of a candidate who has no core. Insider journalists are cynics -- and, moreover, insider journalists want this to be true, because most of them really, really don't want to confront the possibility that the Republican Party (many of whose members are their friends, dammit!) has gone completely bonkers.

So they'll sell the message that Romney is going to be a Republican in the Eisenhower/Ford/Poppy Bush mode -- no matter what he says, even if he's praising the Paul Ryan budget or threatening to "get rid of" Planned Parenthood funding. Anyone who says that Romney will govern from the far right will be deemed an alarmist by the mainstream press, even if the prediction is based on words Romney has actually uttered. Silly Cassandra! Don't you know he'll just Etch A Sketch all that away?

Me, I think President Romney would be a puppet of crazy teabaggers in Congress, and of the billionaire Koch retreat attendees who own them. I think he'll give us a national version of the right-wing state governments we've had across the country since the 2010 elections. Which makes me a silly alarmist who doesn't know how an Etch A Sketch works, I guess.

(Via Memeorandum. X-posted at Booman Tribune.)