Mitt Romney's 'birther' remark is grubby and ugly

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk

BY:Peter Foster

Who would be an adviser to Mitt Romney? Expend a decade of blood, sweat and tears to win him the Republican party presidential nomination only for him to self-destruct on the eve of the biggest moment in his political life.

That’s what happened in Michigan today when Mr Romney appeared to appeared to join the nutty fringe of his party by questioning whether Barack Obama was really born in the USA. “Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital, I was born in Harper Hospital. No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate,” he said, addressing a rally in his home state, “they know that this is the place where both of us were born and raised.” The subtext is grubby and nasty. Just as it was when Joe Biden said last week (to a partly African-American audience) that Romney and Ryan want to “put y’all back in chains”. That was a hideous (and I’d guess calculated) remark, but it comes from a gaffe-prone Veep, not the top the ticket. This weekend was supposed to be all about the run-up to Romney’s accepting the nomination in Tampa, but guess what everyone’s going to be talking about. I can only imagine what senior advisers like Eric Fehrnstrom and Stuart Stevens are doing at this moment. They must be sitting in darkened rooms repeatedly slamming their heads into a desk and screaming: “Why? Why? Why? Why?”