Evergreen Presidential Campaign News

OK, so fewer than three hours after posting an entry about Mitt Romney (link in case you need it at this point; in short, former Massachusetts governor and now a leading GOP presidential candidate), I've decided to take it down. Considering I'm a reporter in Massachusetts and always worrying -- seriously I check my apartment door is locked every night even thought it locks automatically when you close it -- some of the thoughts probably went too far.

Perhaps it raises an interesting question on what reporters can say in the public sphere even when they're speaking/writing personally, not professionally? It just all seems too constricting to me and that too many people -- most especially those like Romney, not that he would ever read this -- think that if a reporter expresses a weighted personal opinion, she can't ignore that and report objectively as a professional.

Two thoughts about Romney:

1. I wanted to write "I hope I have his hair when I'm his age considering almost every male ancestor of mine is bald," but then, nah, his is just way too plastic.

2. Lots of begrudging respect for his top press guy, Eric Fehrnstrom. Fehrnstrom's quite nimble with his rhetoric, and slyly pompous -- a true sign of a good flack. (Most P.R. people, i.e. the bad ones, are obviously and annoyingly pompous; the worst are flat unhelpful and sound unhappy when you call, as though their jobs weren't largely comprised of talking to reporters.) Fehrnstrom was especially impressive, I thought, throughout '06, when Romney had essentially already started the presidential campaign and was rarely in the state governing. (Something the Globe pointed out about once per month.) Whenever anything hit the fan, aside from the Big Dig tunnel collapse, whose response was beneficial to Romney's campaign, Fehrnstrom was there, fending off the press (usually Frank Phillips) in a very deft way. Anyway, I have to respect someone who's good at his job, even if I'd rather get hit by a car than have that job.