Etch-a-Sketch Mitt

Well I guess I owe Eric Fehrnstrom (senior aid to the Romney campaign) an apology, I ridiculed him in a previous blog on his “Etch-a-Sketch” remark.  I was clearly wrong as the “Etch-a-Sketch” seems to be working just fine. 

If Romney wins it will clearly hinge on the first debate, Obama slept thru while Romney slid to the center and defused millions of dollars in negative campaign ads in a short hour and a half.  Why did this work so well, after all the Romney camp could not have planned it?  You can’t possibly plan on a media master like Obama showing up so desultory. 

The aspect of all this that I missed is hidden in the numbers of viewers; the Republican nomination debates drew approximately 7.6 million viewers, the Republican Convention about 22 million, the first presidential debate; a whopping 70 million viewers.   Clearly millions of viewers were paying attention for the first time, and what they saw was a centrist Mitt Romney and I suspect the reaction of many viewers was something like “this guy’s not so bad.”  That (maybe) is all Romney needed in light of the failed presidency of Barak Obama. 

Mitt was right!

Many on the left have jumped on Romney's statement during last night’s debate; "But gosh, to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone — that's a great idea because if there's a two-parent family, the prospect of living in poverty goes down dramatically. The opportunities that the child will — will be able to achieve increase dramatically."   Many on the left viewed this comment as a slap in the face to single parents (I have heard references to this at least 4 times this morning).  What Romney was referring to, of course, was a famous study done by William Galston (of the Brookings Institute) a Clinton domestic policy advisor in which he stated;  “You need only do three things in this country to avoid poverty - finish high school, marry before having a child, and marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of the families who do this are poor 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor.”

Romney did not make the argument as clear as he should, after all the question Romney was "answering" related to gun control but the clarity and logic of Galston's thesis is abiding and one that all American's and their policy makers should take to heart.