Gingrich, via POLITICO's Ginger Gibson, called Fehrnstrom's comment a sign that the conservative movement couldn't trust Romney to stick to his positions in the fall:
"Now given everybody's fears about Gov. Romney's flip-flops, to have his communications director say publicly to all of us, if we're dumb enough to nominate him we should expect by the acceptance speech he'll move back to the left, triggers everything we should worry about," he told a crowd in Lake Charles, La.
"How many of you have ever had an Etch-a-Sketch? My children had Etch A Sketches, they were great for car rides. But you'll notice that their pictures aren't permanent, their pictures aren't locked down. You can redo it any time you want. That's the problem. If you're somebody who invents RomneyCare and at the signing ceremony you say that your closest collaborator was Teddy Kennedy, it's really hard to explain to us that you're really conservative," he continued. "And if you ran for governor saying you love gun control laws and thought that the gun control laws in Massachusetts are terrific, it's pretty hard to convince pro-second amendment folks that you can be trusted. And if you ran as a pro-choice candidate who actually wrote Planned Parenthood into RomneyCare by name it's a little tricky to convince us you're right to life. So here's Gov. Romney's staff, they don't even have the decency to wait until they get the nomination to explain to us how they'll sell us out, and I think having an Etch A Sketch as your campaign model, raises every doubt about where we're going."
UPDATE: Santorum, too, stopped at Toys R Us and bought an Etch A Sketch for campaign events, per POLITICO's Juana Summers:......
Sanctimonium doing what he does best, stealing Newt's ideas, words, thoughts and plans... It is really getting pathetic... really. I actually thought he's be too embarrassed to do this outrightly, he usually steals Newt's stuff on the sly, but I guess you can never think too little of Santorum...
Please, please tell me this is a joke!