TAMPA, Fla. — The first time I ever saw the elder John Sununu, he was wearing yellow bermuda shorts, white socks, and sandals, and he was asking me how I liked a tennis tournament up in New Hampshire, which I liked pretty well, actually, except that it was a clay-court tournament and almost all the participants looked and spoke like members of obscure Argentine hair-metal bands. So, there was a kind of rough historical synergy here this morning watching him act as a principal surrogate for Willard Romney before an audience of bi-skeptical Hispanic journalists. The best way for the unilingual crowd in the house to follow the Spanish portions of the proceedings was to wait and listen for the English words that just sort of lay there in the flow of the conversation like little lumps of mayonnaise. These included "Mitt Romney," "John McCain," "Jeb Bush," and, regrettably for the campaign, "self-deportation."

"I think," Sununu explained, lapsing into a form of English common to political surrogates and aluminum-siding salesmen, "we need to encourage opportunity and entrepreneurship among the people who come here, and make sure they know that they've come to a land of opportunity. We have a plan to make it truly attractive to those who by choice came to this country."

The problem, of course, is that the Republican platform, which will not be revealed in its full official glory on the floor of the Tampa Bay Times Forum until tomorrow, probably because they're working on a way to keep the actual physical copies of it from causing strange dermal reactions by which everyone turns white, very likely contains language not dissimilar to Romney's earlier notion of solving the immigration problem by "encouraging" undocumented immigrants to "self-deport" through clever mechanisms like the Papers, Please Law in Arizona, and the Let The Produce Rot In The Fields Act in Alabama. Recall that, in a campaign that has been little more than one mendacious cheap shot after another, one of the very first Romney threw came in a debate when he went up one side of Rick Perry and down the other for the latter's criminally compassionate move of allowing the children of the undocumented to attend the public colleges in Texas.

There are only two presiding questions worth pursuing at this truncated convention:

1) Can Willard Romney sell enough centrist bullshit to walk back the amount of wingnut bullshit he had to sling to get nominated, and does he even want to do it?, and

B) How far can any politician with plans for the future distance himself from the party's official platform without burning copies of it in a public ceremony along the river walk?

Of course, the most egregious example of the latter is the knots into which the party is tying itself over Mr. Happy Ovary Guy, Todd Akin. (The platform agrees with him. The pols would like him fed to the tarpon.) Here, though, were Sununu, and a congressman from San Antonion named Quico Canseco, come to tell Hispanic voters that Willard's obvious compassion should be enough to distract them from the fact that the official Republican party position on many of these issues is about as compassionate as a tackhammer.

"My understanding [of the platform]," the congressman said, "is that a lot of it is rhetoric and conclusion." He also does not use the phrase, "self-deportation." Instead, he calls it "auto-deportation," which sounds like something you'd pay $150 an hour for in some place out by the airport.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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