“Eric had the same attitude I did. He’s a Massachusetts native like me. And guys like us—white heterosexuals without trust funds—we were never going to get hired by the Globe, so we decided pretty quickly that we were going to have fun.” Fun meant wrecking people.
–Howie Carr
GQ has a sort of paean to Mitt Romney’s seeing-eye pit bull Eric Fehrnstrom. I say sort of, because I don’t read a lot of glitzy magazine writing so it’s a little hard for me to tell. After reading it, however, I now recognize Eric Fehrnstrom’s fingerprints all over this one. It has all the hallmarks of his Boston Herald picture of Evelyn Murphy back in the day. And that lack of access to Scott Brown? It’s a Fehrnstrom strategy that started with Mitt Romney in his tenure as governor and has continued with Mitt as candidate.
Eric gives Mitt a capability that Mitt doesn’t have,” says Ben Coes, Romney’s campaign manager in 2002. “It’s a streetwise savvy; it’s an on-the-ground Boston-smarts mentality; it’s a back-alley-politics, survival-of-the-fittest point of view. Mitt is not a knife fighter. Eric is a knife fighter.” The best political operatives are the ones who provide their clients with a tangible quality the candidate himself lacks. If Karl Rove was Bush’s brain, then Fehrnstrom is Romney’s balls.
I like the comparison. It sounds great. But is it balls or douchiness that makes Eric run? Where are the balls behind CrazyKhazei twitter?
I wasn’t following state politics when Fehrnstrom was writing for the Boston Herald. So tell me, was it ballsy when he flew to Florida to photograph Evelyn Murpy in her running shorts?
Together with a photographer, he flew from freezing Boston to sunny Sanibel and staked her out. They eventually ambushed Murphy while she was jogging, leading to an unflattering picture of her in her running shorts on the Herald’s front page—”her middle-aged thighs flouncing across 300,000 newspapers,” as Fehrnstrom would later describe it. The photograph helped end her political career.
Or is this the kind of thing white heterosexual males without a trust fund do all the time? In any event, it wasn’t personal.
“We political writers…were in fact a sort of underworld mob unto ourselves,” Fehrnstrom later recalled in a 1999 essay about his journalism career that he wrote for Boston magazine. “We figured most pols were overdue in their accounts to the devil anyway.” He added: “In my trade, politics was never personal. Hell, people were rarely people—they were ducks in a shooting gallery.”
Aside from a character study, does Fehrnstrom matter? If Romney wins the election, he would, as the article says, becomes Romney’s Karl Rove, probably sending false tweets about Al Franken and Nancy Pelosi. It’s an unappetizing thought. If Romney loses, Fehrnstrom may be back kicking around Massachusetts, unless, just maybe someone with a national reputation wants him. And then we’ll just have Rob Gray to kick around.
and Fehrnstrom’s a white guy.
What’s the connection?
be 1/32 Native American!
Which would make my mom 1/16 Native American. Which would mean we might be able to cash in on a casino somewhere.
Alas, my genealogical researches have shown nothing. And claiming Native American heritage was once popular for a certain generation of New England families.
Kidding aside, I don’t know what Ferhnie’s average is, but he certainly makes more than his share of errors.