Thanks to an ad campaign that will no longer even happen, the presidential race’s topic of the day is Reverend Jeremiah Wright and, more specifically, Mitt Romney’s difficulty deciding whether Wright’s relationship with President Obama is a legitimate issue. After the Times broke word of the prospective Wright ads this morning, Romney told Town Hall that he “repudiate[s] the effort by that PAC to promote an ad strategy of the nature they’ve described.” Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, also released a statement proclaiming, “Gov. Romney is running a campaign based on jobs and the economy, and we encourage everyone else to do the same.”
And yet, back in February on Sean Hannity’s radio show, Romney himself criticized Obama for “listening to Reverend Wright.” You can see there’s something of a message clash here. So, at a press conference this afternoon, inquiring minds wanted to know: Does Romney still stand by his remarks to Hannity? Romney concurred, in a most Seussian fashion, that he does:
“I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.”
It is not unreasonable to wonder how Romney could stand by what he said if he doesn’t even know what he said. Perhaps Romney is just so confident in his own celebrated record of consistency that the possibility of him saying something he no longer agrees with is unfathomable.
