Romney can’t shake off his ‘Etch A Sketch’ label

Presidential candidates are used to having all sorts of derogatory monikers hurled in their direction. But they don’t expect them to come from one of their own senior advisers. And yet that’s exactly what’s happened to Mitt Romney this week. On Wednesday, just after Romney had won the Illinois primary and secured the endorsement of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Eric Fehrnstrom told CNN:

‘Well, 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’

The point he was making isn’t a particularly novel one: candidates usually have to play to their base to secure their party’s nomination before pivoting to the centre for the general election. But for Romney — a candidate who’s already been attacked by Republicans for not being conservative enough and by Democrats for being a ‘flip-flopper’ — the analogy is a very damaging one indeed.

Indeed, the ‘Etch A Sketch’ has dominated the last two days of campaigning. The obligatory etchasketchmittromney.com was online within hours. Both Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich brandished Etch A Sketches at campaign events. The Democrats put out a video calling him ‘unshakably extreme’. And Ron Paul has, true to form, released an ad attacking everyone else for talking about Etch A Sketches. And the big winner in all this? The Ohio Art Company — creator of the Etch A Sketch — whose stock price more than doubled as Amazon sales of the toy soared.

Santorum’s pushed the attack furthest, and perhaps too far. He said:

‘You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you’re going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future.’

This has been taken as a suggestion that sticking with Obama might be better than electing Romney — not a suggestion that goes down well with the majority of Republicans, whose focus is on defeating Obama. Romney has seized the opportunity for a counterattack:

‘I was disappointed to hear that Rick Santorum would rather have Barack Obama as president than a Republican. This election is more important than any one person. It is about the future of America. Any of the Republicans running would be better than President Obama and his record of failure.’

And Gingrich also slammed Santorum’s remark in a Tweet:

‘Rick Santorum is dead wrong. Any GOP nominee will be better than Obama.’

Certainly Santorum was foolish to suggest that there might be something worse than seeing Obama re-elected (even though he now says ‘I’m gonna support whoever wins the Republican nomination’). But despite Romney’s efforts, and that bit of assistance from Gingrich, it won’t override the image of Mitt Romney as an Etch A Sketch. The problem for him is that, as so many commentators have said, it serves to reinforce a pre-existing negative perception of the candidate. The most damaging attacks are always those that do.