At this point, far too much ink — digital and analog — has been spilled covering Mitt Romney’s bizarre exaggeration about his father marching with Martin Luther King, but let’s just add one closing note.
To briefly recap, Romney, hoping to defend his civil rights and record and his church’s racist past, has repeatedly claimed that he saw his father march with Dr. King. An investigation indicated that George Romney, who was strong on civil rights, never marched with MLK, prompting Romney and his campaign to start parsing the words “saw,” “march,” and “with.”
It looked like the embarrassing flap had just about ended, until the Romney campaign directed reporters to two women who corroborated a story that Romney had already conceded wasn’t literally true.
Shirley Basore, 72, says she was sitting in the hairdresser’s chair in wealthy Grosse Pointe, Mich., back in 1963 when a rumpus started and she discovered that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and her governor, George Romney, were marching for civil rights — right past the window.
With the cape still around her neck, Basore went outside and joined the parade.
“They were hand in hand,” recalled Basore, a former high-school English teacher. “They led the march. We all swung our hands, and they held their hands up above everybody else’s.” … Another witness, Ashby Richardson, 64, of Massachusetts gave the campaign a similar account.
A ha, the Romney campaign said, the story that wasn’t literally true may be accurate after all.
Except that’s still wrong. Worse, it’s part of a pattern.
The Boston Phoenix, which helped get this story started a few days ago, found that the witnesses must be remembering the decades-old event incorrectly.
Two women contacted the Mitt Romney campaign this week, offering their memories of seeing Romney’s father march with Martin Luther King Jr., in Grosse Point Michigan in 1963. Campaign officials were well aware that the women were mistaken. Yet, they directed those women to tell their stories to a Politico reporter. The motives and memories of the two women are unknown and irrelevant; the motives of the campaign, however, were obvious — to spread information they knew to be untrue, for the good of the candidate.
By getting this story out late on Friday afternoon, heading into the holiday weekend — good luck getting a King historian on the phone before Wednesday — the campaign was pretty well assured that it could keep alive through Christmas their claim that Mitt Romney was mistaken only about “seeing” it, not about it taking place.
Then-governor George Romney did indeed march in Grosse Pointe, on Saturday, June 29, 1963, but Martin Luther King Jr. was not there; he was in New Brunswick, New Jersey, addressing the closing session of the annual New Jersey AFL-CIO labor institute at Rutgers University.
Those facts are indisputable, and quite frankly, the campaign must have known the women’s story would eventually be debunked — few people’s every daily movement has been as closely tracked and documented as King’s.
The campaign couldn’t leave well enough alone. They had to push their luck, bringing witnesses forward whose claims are, alas, still wrong.
Worse, the NYT notes that Romney’s tall tales are a constant drag on his credibility.
There was the period last spring when Mitt Romney claimed while campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire that he had been a hunter “pretty much all my life,” only to have to admit later he had seriously hunted on only two occasions.
Then there was the endorsement Mr. Romney claimed on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday that he received from the National Rifle Association while running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, when it turned out the group had never endorsed him.
Mr. Romney’s latest concession is that he only “figuratively” saw his late father, George, march with Martin Luther King Jr., something he claimed in his highly publicized speech about his Mormon faith earlier this month. Some publications have raised doubts that the event ever happened at all.
Mr. Romney once said about misstatements by his Republican rival, Rudolph W. Giuliani, “facts are stubborn things.” But does he have his own problem with blurring the truth?
I’d still argue Romney’s habit of habitual exaggerations pale in comparison to Giuliani’s, but the former governor is catching up quickly. Check out the whole article; it’s an ugly record.