about the Romney campaign is that they were all done — done, we tell you! — with this whole running-for-president business after 2008, when they all went around the country and discovered that, the more people got to know the paterfamilias, the more those people thought he looked like the banker come to foreclose on the new baby and wanted to pelt him with hand sfull of manure. Then, of course, America went and elected itself a guy who doesn't know fk-all about throwing people out of work and, because of that, the economy stayed mired in the Great Recession caused by the policies of "America's First MBA President" and the family reluctantly decided that only Willard's mad economizing skillz could save the country. So they all gathered around the kitchen table, the family dog half-snoozing by the fire while keeping one eye on the roof ot the car, and they declared that they would all somehow suck it up and let Pops go around the country making himself unpopular again, in case there was anyone they missed four years ago....

"The reason I changed my mind is I recognized that the country needed my husband," Romney, 63, told the Herald/Times as she campaigned recently in Pensacola. "And it wasn't obviously a convenient thing to think about or even a pleasant thing to think about, but it was an absolute necessity that we do it."

All the available evidence indicates that Willard Romney stopped running for president for approximately 28 seconds some time in November of 2008. A bunch of his former aides put together Restore Our Future, his super-PAC in early 2010, and one can assume they'd been planning it for longer than that. (By the spring of that year, they'd already raised $43 million, almost all of it from Willard's pals in the financial sector.) He was writing his campaign book, No Apology, all through 2009 for a launch in March of 2010. By the time this heartfelt family gathering allegedly took place, the book already was in its adjusted paperback form to suit the people who'd taken over the party in the 2010 midterms.

There's nothing wrong with any of this. People don't wake up one day and run for president, and hardly anyone thinks they do. But it is not the job of the media to pass along obvious campaign mythology. Dear National Media: Just because they say it, doesn't mean you have to print it.

(Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog)

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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