Prey away the gay

Is there anything Team Romney can't screw up? When he hired this guy, the media narrative was all, hey look! The Mittster is pivoting away from the icky social conservatives and throwing this appointment in their face. Now, only two weeks later, it's pretty clear the social cons own Romney's sorry ass:

Richard Grenell, the openly-gay conservative foreign policy spokesperson hired by Mitt Romney, has resigned from the campaign following right-wing pressure, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin reports. “[M]y ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign,” Grenell said in a statement, which came less than two weeks after he was hired. Conservative groups like the American Family Foundation painted Grenell as a “homosexual activist” and condemned Romney for bringing him on board.

Team Romney is trying to put a brave face on this fiasco. They claim they begged him not to resign and they're very disappointed he decided to leave the team for "personal reasons." But all that happened behind closed doors. They didn't exactly deploy a vigorous public defense. They can't risk getting between the SocCons and their prey this early in the game. And it's difficult not to notice they hired the guy as a spokesman, but they never let Grennell speak.

Ari Fleischer, a former Bush administration official and one of Grenell’s most vocal defenders, raised that question in a telephone interview moments ago.

“Why wasn’t Rick the spokesman in the last couple of days, when foreign policy was paramount? That’s the piece I don’t understand,” Fleischer said. “I don’t know why he wasn’t the spokesman on foreign policy for the last several days. It’s something that nobody understands.”

Meanwhile, teh gay Republicans of the Log Cabin, blame both sides. And sure, the left immediately jumped on the guy for his long history of bizarre misogynistic tweets and such, but since when is pissing off hippies a problem with the base? Grenell scrubbed his timelines to fix that little problem.

No, this victory belongs to the social cons and anybody who thinks Willard is going to be able to "move to the center" before the convention is dreaming.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]