Good Thursday noon,

At midnight last night, Team Romney put out a press release, headlined: WHAT THEY’RE REALLY SAYING ABOUT GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY AT THE DURHAM, NH GOP DEBATE  (it doesn’t seem to be available online yet, I’ll link to it later if it shows up).

It claims, not only that Romney won last night’s GOP debate (I don’t doubt that every campaign is making a similar claim), but that this is what other, presumably less-biased observors, are REALLY SAYING about Romney’s performance.

Judging winners and losers in the moments immediately after such a debate is a dicey exercise at best, and I recommend against it. Nonetheless, by midnight, countless bloggers had given first reactions, and, the Romney press release lifted pro-Romney quotes from 11 of them, with (to the campaign’s credit), links to the original so you could check for yourself the full context. That small intellectual honesty point is, unfortunately, taken back…

… by the heavy-handed dishonesty of the choices. The one that jumped out at me, from the press release, was the excerpt from Marc Ambinder’s Atlantic magazine-based political blog. The excerpt in the press release read:

 ”Otherwise, Romney, being very familiar with New Hampshire’s inner maw, had well-thought out answers for every other question, even as three of the first four turned, in some measure, on whether he flip-flopped.”

This is, of course, full of clues that despite the somewhat back-handed compliment for Romney’s “well-thought-out answers,” Ambinder’s overall take was not a rave.

But clicking through to the full piece, it was worse than I expected. It begins:

“My head tells me not to anoint winners, because, really, I’m not a New Hampshire voter and what the heck do I know about how they watched the debate? My gut instinct: Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani won. John McCain did very well, too.”

The first substantial appearance of Romney in the piece, in the 8th paragraph of a 12-paragraph piece, was to note that John McCain obviously finds Romney annoying. Romney gets his full Ambinder assessment in the next two paragraphs:

“When the father of a U.S. soldier chastised Mitt Romney for comparing the Romney boys’ political service to the service of soldiers for their country, the dramatic tension would have been resolved by an apology — even though Romney has already apologized. It was the hardest moment to watch. This is where Romney’s crispness cuts too harshly. He seemed not to connect with the father’s evident pain and hurt.

Otherwise, Romney, being very familiar with New Hampshire’s inner maw, had well-thought out answers for every other question, even as three of the first four turned, in some measure, on whether he flip-flopped. A strong answer on abortion; there “two lives” to consider, he said — the baby and the woman. Fox’s Wendell Goler implied that Romney would withdraw troops quicker than Hillary Clinton, a low blow that might hit Romney later on. Romney seems to want to balance support for the surge with an acknowledgment of the political realities in America. That Romney raised $260M in fees came up for the first time in a debate, but it’s a subject many New Hampshire Republicans probably know about and probably is irrelevant when McCain and Giuliani refuse to sign Grover Norquist’s tax pledge. TBD: whether Romney’s efforts to draw a distinction between himself and Giuliani succeeded or was lost in the rest of the debate.”

Citing this piece in a roundup that is supposed to show Romney getting rave reviews has a certain air of desperation. Unfortunately, this kind of selective perception is not at all rare, certainly not unusual to Romney and I feel a little embarrassed singling him out on it. It’s just, as I said a couple of posts back, I’m not in the mood to grade intellectual honesty on the curve this year.

It’s a simple matter. If the press release had somehow disclosed at the top that it was a collection of favorable things about Romney from the instant reactions, that would be much better. Calling it “WHAT THEY’RE REALLY SAYING” makes it some form of attempted deception.