“He did the right thing.”
That’s John Sununu’s take on Romney’s press conference.
“He responded immediately and he didn’t hide from it,” Sununu tells me. “He didn’t send a surrogate out to talk about it, and he didn’t blame anybody else.”
The leaked videos, Sununu predicts, “will not dominate” the campaign.
Sununu acknowledges, however, that the press loves the story.
“This was launched by the Obama-ites as a distraction, and there will be another Obama distraction launched tomorrow,” he says. “They have a rather subservient mainstream press that is just sitting there every morning, waiting to put the next distraction into the public domain instead of talking about the big economic issues.”
Sununu urges conservatives to stay cool. “This provides an opportunity to pound Obama on class warfare,” he says. “The president is always out there, trying to divide America, and the governor’s response, I think, underscored Obama’s divisiveness.”
“Look, it is a requirement in this politically correct world of campaigns that you acknowledge the flaw of language immediately,” Sununu says. “But he made sure they understood that the point was a response, on his part, to the president’s class warfare.”
Sununu, who is Romney’s fiercest senior adviser, says Romney’s refusal to disavow the thrust of his remarks says much about the Republican nominee’s character.
“In the past, I’ve apologized for an inelegant phrase, but even then, I emphasized that the fundamental point was correct,” Sununu says. “You have to do that sometimes, to make sure that the point isn’t lost in the semantics.”