Our Friends at Blogs for Mitt
by Ryan Sager
Tue, 24 Apr 2007 at 12:25 PM
updated Tue, 24 Apr 2007 at 12:27 PM
Blogs for Mitt, demonstrating the commitment to honesty that has made their favored candidate such a success, implies that I was the source of the rumor about a possible defection from Camp Mitt to Camp Fred that appeared on NHInsider.com.
Since they apparently think I was being cagey about the issue yesterday, let me be clear: I had nothing to do with spreading any rumor about the Romney campaign, and I never implied otherwise. The first I ever read of the rumor was at NHInsider.com. My only contribution to the story was, in fact, getting a denial out of the Thompson non-campaign (NHInsider cited a column I wrote a while ago about Mr. Romney, perhaps that's the confusion here).
And, for anyone who thinks I'm unduly harsh regarding Mitt Romney, please see: my coverage of Rudy Giuliani, my coverage of John McCain.
I know reporters have to deal with this in any campaign cycle. If you write a negative story, or provide a damning piece of analysis, it can only be because you hate one candidate or another. And, conversely, if you write anything positive about a candidate, you must be rooting for him or her (I got this one a lot over the last year as I made the case the Rudy Giuliani was the frontrunner and general man-to-beat in the GOP primary — I consider myself proven correct on that point by now, whether or not Mr. Giuliani can ultimately close the deal).
So, anyway, I guess my broader point is that it is a journalist's job to hate everyone. They're all politicians, which means — by definition — they're all scumbags with pretensions of ruling over us. If you're not going to rake people like that over the coals, then you should just go into PR work or stealing vital organs from homeless people — whichever career you find makes it easier to sleep at night.
And one final point: Expect a lot of whining about "anti-Mormon bias" from the Romney camp. It's their way of playing the victim card, and it seems, so far in the campaign, to be the first crowbar his supporters reach for when they feel attacked (see here). There may well be some anti-Mormon bias out there in the country, but I assure the Romney folks that there's a lot less of that in the world than, say, anti-Italian bias, sexism, and racism. So, really, he's not the candidate in this campaign with bias problems to overcome.
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