Hey, we all like to 'fire people'

Column originally published Jan. 10, 2012.

Mitt Romney likes to fire people. He said it himself Monday morning in New Hampshire.

The exact quote, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Maeve Reston: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."

Of course, that's not quite the full story. But that probably won't matter. Mitt said the magic words. He was in front of TV cameras and a battalion of reporters. You can't put the toothpaste in the tube, even if squeezing it out wasn't really a mistake in the first place.

I used to be one of those reporters, covering the Democratic presidential hopefuls as they came through my little corner of Iowa in late 2003 and early 2004.

I saw Howard Dean flipping pancakes in a middle school gymnasium, watched John Edwards work a community college classroom like a Hollywood red carpet and spent an entire Joe Liebermann Labor Day union hall appearance thinking two things: 1. I hope this gets done soon so I can go watch the rest of the Cubs-Cardinals game; and 2. Is the is the same guy who played the dad on "Alf"? I also covered a George W. Bush campaign rally in Davenport later that summer, one of the most interesting events of my reporting career.

Usually, a press corps accompanied the candidates. Usually the local newspaper and radio schlubs would show up on time. Then, anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours later (thanks John Kerry!), the candidate and his handlers would arrive along with the national press corps. What fun it was to see their fancy equipment and big city media ID badges. There I was, shoulder-to-shoulder with folks from Time or CNN or the Boston Globe.

I never did get to witness a gaffe on the level of Romney's Monday morning misstep, so it's tough to say how I would have reacted. But in all honesty, it would be hard to resist the urge to localize the heck out of a national story. It's a chance to put your town and your newspaper on the map, not to mention carve your own initials in a tiny bit of campaign history. The allure is unmistakable.

But using Romney's quote as a test case, it's also patently unfair to the candidate and more or less deliberately misleading to readers/viewers/listeners to isolate one sentence and ignore the context. Average people hate when their own words are misconstrued, but people who love to play partisan politics seem all too happy to use one miscast sentence as if it were the speaker's own self-knotted noose.

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