Eric “Etch-a-Sketch” Ferhnstrom, God’s gift to the Democratic Republican Party, is the gift that keeps on giving. Famous locally for his success with Scott Brown’s senate campaign and creating fake Twitter accounts to attack Democratic candidates for his personal amusement, Fehrnstrom has taken his show nation-wide with the Romney campaign.
Working with a candidate who is known for changing positions as often as most people change their socks, Eric may have contracted the same virus that leads to his boss’s serial gaffing. The Etch-a-Sketch Candidacy could be a saying to last generations. Massachusetts should be proud.
Rick Santorum doesn’t care about the unemployment rate. Mitt Romney likes to fire people and doesn’t care about the very poor.
And Eric Fehrnstrom thinks he can recreate Romney from zero like an Etch A Sketch drawing, with general election voters none the wiser.
A senior Romney adviser, Fehrnstrom on Wednesday became the latest presidential campaign personality to stumble sideways into a classic 2012 gaffe: saying something that he didn’t quite mean to say, which played into a terrible preexisting perception of his candidate.
(See also: Mitt Romney’s 5 worst verbal gaffes)
On national television this morning, Fehrnstrom fumbled by arguing that the 2012 race would reset after the Republican primary, likening it to an Etch A Sketch toy in which pictures get erased and redrawn at will.
Except Fehrnstrom’s language wasn’t quite so precise and it was unclear whether the Etch A Sketch was supposed to represent the 2012 political landscape or the candidate for which he works. What Fehrnstrom literally said was: “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.”
And with that, the Romney adviser triggered a now-familiar 2012 ritual, as opponents piled on with outrage, Romney’s staff circled the wagons and the press hyped the gaffe — which reminded the audience of Romney’s malleability — to epic proportions. By Wednesday afternoon, Etch A Sketch was a trending topic on Twitter.
Romney’s rivals in the Republican primary were especially gleeful over the remark: both Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, following large losses to Romney in Tuesday’s Illinois primary, brandished Etch A Sketches at campaign events to raise the alarm about Romney’s political pliancy.
…he said the etch-a-sketch two knobs are like the Republican and Democratic parties, and if you work them equally, you can make beautiful circles.