There is no question that Bryan Fischer played a key role in the resignation of Richard Grenell from his position with Mitt Romney’s campaign, as Fischer had been relentlessly attacking the campaign for having hired an openly gay man to serve as foreign policy and national security spokesman.
And when Grenell finally resigned, Fischer declared it to be a “huge win,” saying that the Religious Right had taught Romney a lesson and that the campaign would not make this sort of “mistake again.”
And then on Friday, Fischer capped off the crusade by essentially mocking Romney for having caved on this issue to “a yokel like me,” saying that his handling of the Grenell situation was now raising questions about Romney’s leadership abilities since it showed that he could be “pushed around, intimidated, coerced, co-opted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America.”
But apparently Fischer has since realized that demanding concessions from politicians and then mocking those politicians when then make the very concessions that you demanded might be somewhat hypocritical … and so yesterday Fischer offered an amazingly back-handed “apology” to Romney, saying that even though the entire fiasco demonstrated Romney’s weakness and utter lack of core values, he still deserves credit for having done the right thing in letting Grenell go:
I want to issue what amounts to sort of an apology to Gov. Romney. I was pretty hard on him on Friday and my point on Friday was his waffling when conservatives raised a concern about Richard Grenell – he went silent, he put a bag over Richard Grenell’s head, let him fall on his sword, only said supportive things to Richard Grenell after he had resigned – it was an indication of the challenges that we have with Gov. Romney, that he does not seem to have a core set of principles, a core set of values by which he guides himself. And the fact that he could be so – I used the word intimidated or coerced or whatever – could be so influenced by a comparatively small number of conservatives … and so I think it was illustrative of Gov. Romney’s weaknesses and things that we’ve got to be concerned about.
But, at the end of the day, I didn’t make enough of the fact that he did the right thing here. Now, regardless of why he did it – most likely, it was for reasons that are politically expedient – but he did the right thing. He allowed this resignation to take place, probably had some hand in bringing it about; I cannot believe that they were entirely passive in that. But here’s the point: at the end of the day, Richard Grenell had stepped down, this homosexual activist, this crusader for gay marriage had stepped down and Romney could have taken a different tack. So I want to give Romney credit for doing that. Now, you’d like to know that he did it on the grounds of principle and conviction and all that – I believe that would kind of be a bridge too far – but nevertheless, Gov. Romney did the thing that he should have done.
