MSNBC Slammed for Creating Romney 'Gaffe'

How out of touch is Mitt Romney? Perhaps not as much as one MSNBC report suggests. In a clip aired on Andrea Mitchell Reports, Romney describes buying a sandwich at the local Wawa chain to an audience at a Pennsylvania campaign stop. "You press a little touchtone keypad—you touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier—there’s your sandwich. It’s amazing." The clip ended there, to laughter from Mitchell and MSNBC contributor Chris Cillizza, but Romney's words after "amazing" made it clear he was wowed not by the keypad, but by innovation in the private sector, Politico notes.

"People in the private sector have learned how to compete. It's time to bring some competition to the federal government," said Romney, who had recounted an optometrist's bureaucratic nightmare before describing the sandwich buy. MSNBC's misrepresentation of Romney's remarks outraged conservative bloggers, and former MSNBC anchor David Shuster commented that "deceptive editing is always wrong." If the network wanted to mock Mitt's attempt to embrace Pennsylvanian cuisine, it should have taken him to task for ordering "a meatball hero with pickles and sweet peppers rather than a classic hoagie" notes Margaret Hartmann at New York. (More Mitt Romney stories.)