“So now we have a problem, Governor,” said Gov. Romney’s mythical Spinmeister.
“What problem? We just won the Florida primary and the Nevada caucuses, and we destroyed Gingrich with tens of millions of dollars of ads attacking his character — so what’s the problem?” the governor might have responded.
“Are you forgetting about Tuesday night? Santorum walloped you bad in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado. There goes your momentum.”
“Don’t worry about Santorum — we’ll destroy him with personal attack ads the way we destroyed Gingrich. Of course, I know nothing about that if my … I mean the … super PAC is doing them.”
“You know, you have to be careful about attack ads. Newt actually takes your personal attacks personally. Imagine that. He may not forgive you. Huckabee still hates you from what you did to him four years ago.”
“Oh, come on. Newt has no place to go — no matter how much I attack him, he’ll have no choice but to support me.”
“Well,” the Spinmeister replied, “the unemployment statistics just went down to 8.3 percent —200,000 new jobs in the last month, over 3.7 million since Obama took office.”
“Oh, darn. That’s a big problem.”
“Governor, you can’t seem to be upset that more people are working.”
“Well, I can say unemployment isn’t going down fast enough — with a smile,” the governor responded, hopefully.
“Then, on Sunday night, during the Super Bowl, the Democrats ran that Clint Eastwood ad, reminding everyone that the federal government’s loans to GM and Chrysler saved the U.S. auto industry — and helped bring Detroit back.”
“So what does that have to do with me?”
“Well, you opposed that bailout in an op-ed piece at the time.”
“I did?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t I just say I was for it before I was against it?”
“But people would call you a flip-flopper.”
“Who, me? No one would believe that.”
