Mitt Romney: If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, Don't Post It on Youtube

Last week, after a highly contentious debate in Las Vegas, Mitt Romney decided to kick Rick Perry when he was, by all accounts, down.

The Romney camp posted a video on youtube which portrayed Perry as a bumbling, incompetent fool. Or as Talking Points Memo put it, Romney "Bushified" him.

The video was widely derided by journalists and bloggers as maybe just a little too mean.  Before the end of the day, the video had been taken off the web.

But anyone who knows anything about a) the internet and b) teenage gossip political commentary knew straight away that this story was anything but dead.

All I could think while watching this fiasco play out was: did Mitt Romney learn anything from the seminal, mid-2000s, Canadian-made teen drama Degrassi?


Bear with me here.


Degrassi is completely full of helpful life lessons, watch it sometime. However, the specific episode I'm referring to occurs in season 5 when resident good-girl-gone-(Canadian-version-of)-bad Manny gets intoxicated and shows her lady business on camera...

...thus learning the hard way that once a video is up on the internet it never dies.

So if you have even an inkling that you may not want something up on the internet for ever and ever, maybe you should sit on it for a few minutes. Give it a second to make sure you really want everyone in the whole world to be able to see what you're thinking

Now, I learned this lesson through the equivalent of a soap opera for teens when I was 16. How had no one in the Romney camp learned this yet?

After Manny's "Girls Gone Wild" episode, her reputation was completely tarnished for the rest of the season. It was heartbreaking. The worst part was how every time Manny met a new character for the rest of the series, the poor girl had to be reminded of her indiscretion. Manny went down in Degrassi infamy, and she wasn't even running for political office, for Pete's sake! 

The only question left for Romney is how long is he going to have to deal with his own lapse of judgement.  Yes, he took the video off the internet.  But as evidenced by the fact that I'm able to post it in this blog, it's not that hard to find.

More than anything, this video, coupled with Romney's childish behavior at the debate last week, has started painting a portrait of Romney as something of a jerk. And everyone knows there are many qualities we will accept in our president, but being an ass isn't really one of them.

In an election season devoid of any substantive scandals, the effect of a video like this about as close to that of a candidate showing their lady goods for the camera: their reputation is irrevocably tarnished.  And taking the video down did little to repair the damage.

In an election as close as this one is, an error that calls the candidates' personality into question even for a second is one they can't afford to make. 

Moral of the story: when the camera's on, it's best to keep one's private parts and mean thoughts about Rick Perry to oneself. And if that video does somehow get made, for God's sake, keep it off the internet.

Cait