Lessons from Romney Etch a Sketch Gaffe

There’s been so shortage of media coverage on the Romney campaign’s recent “Etch a Sketch” gaffe. But in case you missed it, here’s what happened.

Appearing on CNN's "Starting Point” Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s senior advisor, said that the absence of a GOP challenge could allow Romney to "hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It's like Etch A Sketch," he said. "You can shake it up and we start all over again."

This lead to immediate attacks from Romney's opponents. Rick Santorum said, "He will say what he needs to say to win the election before him, and if he has to say something different because it's a different election and a different group of voters, he will say that too."

Romney has since responded to the statement, saying that “The issues I’m running on will be exactly the same. I’m running as a conservative Republican, I was a conservative Republican governor, I’ll be running as a conservative republican nominee, excuse me, at that point hopefully, nominee for president. The policies and positions are the same.”

What Romney and all politicians should learn is that changing your positions within your platform is bad. My impression is that what Fehrnstrom ought to have said is that they will highlight and emphasize different aspects of their platform for the general election.

That's what 121Campaign is all about. It recognizes that different issues appeal to different voters. That's why it makes it easy for political campaigns to customize landing pages for voters to feature the issues that they care about most, in order to get them more engaged in the campaign.

For campaigns to be agile and effective their focus should be on highlighting relevant content for individual voters and driving engagement because to do otherwise it does indeed come off as "flip-flopping."