Fantasy Politics USA

On Monday on MSNBC’s ‘Andrea Mitchell Reports,’ host Mitchell presented an edited video to make Mitt Romney look out of touch. The video made it look like Romney was amazed about a touchtone screen pad in a convenience store called WaWas. “I was at WaWas, I went in to order a sandwich,” Romney said. “You press a little touchtone keypad, you touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier, there’s your sandwich. It’s amazing.” Mitchell called it “Romney’s super market scanner moment,” in reference to President George’s H.W. Bush during a 1992 grocers’ convention being amazed that you could just scan groceries at the store. Romney wasn’t really amazed about the touchpad, but was instead making a comparison of the private sector versus the public sector. The whole quote from Romney was, “”I was at WaWas, I went in to order a sandwich. You press a little touchtone keypad, you touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier, there’s your sandwich. It’s amazing. People in the private sector have learned how to compete. It’s time to bring some competition to the federal government.”
Here is Andrea Mitchell’s version;

Here is Mitchell’s non-apology aired the next day due to criticism of the edited version. “We ran clips of Mitt Romney in Cornwall, Pennsylvania, talking about his trip to a WaWa,” Mitchell said. “Well, the RNC and the campaign both reached out to us saying that Romney had more to say about that visit, about federal bureaucracy and innovation in the private sector. We didn’t get a chance to play that, so here it is now.”