Bernstein bites back

Defenders of Mitt Romney are very excited about a story by the Politico's Mike Allen reporting that two women actually saw the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Michigan Gov. George Romney marching together in Grosse Pointe in 1963. As well they should be. "I remember it vividly," says one alleged eyewitness. "I was only 15 or 20 feet from where both of them were."

But memories play tricks. And David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix, who broke this story on Wednesday, says contemporaneous news coverage makes it clear that while Romney was marching on behalf of King's agenda in Grosse Pointe, King himself was hundreds of miles away, speaking at an AFL-CIO gathering at Rutgers University.

Bernstein is withering in his contempt for the Romney campaign's dumping this stuff on the Politico, writing, "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."

This is not a small mistake for the Mittster. As Bernstein noted in his original story, Mitt Romney had claimed not just that his father and King had marched together, but that he had personally observed it. And in a devastating piece in the Boston Globe on Friday, Michael Levenson noted that Mitt had on at least one occasion gone quite a bit further, telling the Boston Herald in 1978, "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Nor is Washington Post columnist David Broder likely to say anything helpful to Romney. Broder co-authored a George Romney biography in the '60s in which he reported the claim that the elder Romney and King had marched together. But here's what the Post had to say earlier today:

The Romney campaign initially cited a 1967 book co-authored by Washington Post staff writer David S. Broder, which stated that Romney "marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit." But the book did not provide a source for the event, and Broder told The Post that he cannot remember where he heard the information.

What an astonishing muddle the Republican presidential campaign is now in.

Mitt Romney and the truth

Reporters don't like to call politicians liars, even when they lie. We tend to use euphemisms — "at odds with the facts" being a favorite. But Mitt Romney is a liar — a flagrant repeat offender. Everyone knows it, and the press doesn't quite know what to do about it.

Yesterday, Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson couldn't take it anymore, interrupting Romney when he said, "I don't have lobbyists running my campaign. I don't have lobbyists that are tied to my —"

"That's not true," Johnson interjected. "Ron Kaufman's a lobbyist." Kaufman, a longtime Massachusetts politico and a lobbyist, has been heavily involved in Romney's campaign.

If you watch the video, you'll see that Romney tries to hang his argument on a technicality, saying that Kaufman isn't "running" his campaign. But it is simply a matter of objective fact that Kaufman is "tied" to Romney's campaign (as Romney started to say), and at a very high level.

I know Johnson a bit. He's a professional. Perhaps he shouldn't have leaped in quite as aggressively as he did yesterday, but how much of this garbage can he be expected to listen to? And do watch the video all the way to the end. You don't want to miss Romney and his spokesman, Eric Ferhnstrom, trying to intimidate Johnson for doing his job.

Just two prominent other examples of Romney's lies that you probably already know about:

• At a televised debate in New Hampshire, John McCain complained that Romney had described his illegal-immigration proposal as "amnesty" in a television commercial. Romney's response: "I don't describe your plan as amnesty in my ad. I don't call it amnesty." Well, yes he did.
  
• As David Bernstein recently revealed in the Boston Phoenix, Romney's oft-repeated claim that his father, George Romney, had marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is not true. Some Romney defenders, including Jay Severin of WTKK (96.9 FM), continue to insist that Romney only meant it metaphorically. But the Romney campaign knew better, producing two eyewitnesses who claimed — falsely — that they had seen the elder Romney and King walking side by side in Grosse Pointe, Mich., in 1963. And this 1978 quote from the Mittster would seem to be beyond parsing: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Of course, the entire reason that Romney has suddenly reassumed his former persona as a skilled business executive is that Republicans found his late embrace of right-wing social issues to be utterly unbelievable, as the Globe's Scot Lehigh notes today.

Even as a liberal media critic, I don't like calling Romney a liar. But Romney is proving to be something of an ethical test for journalists. When a candidate lies repeatedly, as Romney has, should a journalist maintain objectivity and refrain from saying the obvious? Or does he or she have an ethical obligation to point out that the liar is lying again? I'd argue the latter.

Scott Allen Miller, who saved me the trouble of tracking down the video, weighs in usefully.

More lobbyists: Bernstein's got 'em. (Via the Outraged Liberal.)

George Romney's phantom march

Did George Romney ever march with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? Romney's son Mitt has said he did, most recently in what struck me as a pretty effective appearance on "Meet the Press" this past Sunday. But now David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix reports there's no evidence.

Follow-up: The Romney campaign appears to be taking the line that George Romney really did march with King, only not in the same city and not on the same day. Huh?