Mitt Romney Doesn't Remember What He Said, But Stands By 'Whatever it Was'
At a press conference in Jacksonville today, Mitt Romney said he rejected a plan presented by GOP strategists to a Super PAC funded by Cubs-owning billionaire Joe Ricketts aimed at "defeating" President Obama by rehashing his ties to controversial reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Back in February, Romney himself brought up Wright in an interview with Sean Hannity on his radio show. "I think again that the president takes his philosophical leanings in this regard, not from those who are ardent believers in various faiths but instead from those who would like America to be more secular," Romney said then. "And I'm not sure which is worse, him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation."
Asked today if he still stood by those remarks, Romney responded that he was "not familiar, precisely, with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."
Ricketts, earlier, released a statement through a spokesman distancing himself from the "Ricketts Plan."
"Mr. Ricketts intends to work hard to help elect a president this fall who shares his commitment to economic responsibility," spokesman Brian Baker said, "but his efforts are and will continue to be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy, not attacks that seek to divide us socially or culturally."
Though Baker claims his boss was "neither the author nor the funder" of the multimillion-dollar ad campaign proposal, the strategists who submitted it to Ricketts' Ending Spending Action Fund note in the document that it was his "preliminary approval" that moved the plan forward.
