Don’t try this at home, folks. It takes a professional politician to pull it off with a straight face.

A sampling of the also-rans’ anti-Romney rhetoric when they were candidates and their obligatory niceness after endorsing Romney.

___

RICK SANTORUM

The former Pennsylvania senator still doesn’t have trouble curbing his enthusiasm for Romney. He waited a month after dropping out of the race to endorse Romney, then emailed his tepid endorsement in the dead of night. He finally got out the E-word in the 13th paragraph of his 16-paragraph statement.

THEN:

—”He is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.” Santorum later said he was referring to Romney’s standing on health care reform.

—”If Mitt Romney’s an economic heavyweight, we’re in trouble, because he was 47th out of 50 in job creation in the state of Massachusetts when he was governor. He may have had some success at making money for himself and his partners at Bain Capital, and I give him a lot of credit for doing so, but that’s a very different thing than going out and creating an atmosphere for people to create — that create jobs.”

NOW:

—”There are many significant areas in which we agree: the need for lower taxes, smaller government and a reduction in out-of-control spending. We certainly agree that abortion is wrong and marriage should be between one man and one woman. I am also comfortable with Gov. Romney on foreign policy matters, and we share the belief that we can never allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons. And while I had concerns about Gov. Romney making a case as a candidate about fighting against Obamacare, I have no doubt if elected he will work with a Republican Congress to repeal it and replace it.” — Endorsement emailed to Santorum supporters.

___

NEWT GINGRICH

Gingrich didn’t formally endorse Romney when he dropped out of the race but spoke well of him and later said that was close enough. The guy who promised not to run down his GOP opponents at the start of the race had some withering things to say about Romney during the heat of the campaign. Gingrich, a former House speaker, would rather you forget that now, though: His anti-Romney videos on YouTube, once public, are now private. The man who repeatedly branded Romney a “Massachusetts moderate” now calls him a “solid conservative.”

THEN:

—”Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when he is president.”

—Are you calling Mitt Romney a liar? “Yes.” Questioned about his previous comment.

—”Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?” To Romney during a debate.

—”Why would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama?”

—”We are not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about.”

—”I think that a bold Reagan conservative with a very strong economic plan is a lot more likely to succeed in that campaign than a relatively timid Massachusetts moderate who even The Wall Street Journal said had an economic plan so timid it resembled Obama.”

NOW:

—”I’m going to campaign for him, I favor him over Obama. I went through, like, seven different issues where I favor him. I’ll do everything I can to help elect Romney. … As far as I’m concerned, I’ve endorsed him.”

—”Compared to Barack Obama, Mitt Romney is a solid conservative. And I think you have to come down to, what’s the choice this November? And the choice is the most radical president in American history and a failed president at the economy and somebody who has a solid record on jobs and who, in fact, on basic principles, is conservative. And I think you can get into arguments about who’s how conservative, but compared to Obama, Mitt Romney is a solid conservative.”

___

MICHELE BACHMANN

Bachmann waited four months after dropping out before she endorsed Romney. The congresswoman from Minnesota campaigned with him in Virginia earlier this month but didn’t bring up health care in their joint appearance.

THEN:

—”He can’t beat Obama because his policy is the basis of Obamacare. The signature issue of Obama is Obamacare. You can’t have a candidate who has given the blueprint for Obamacare. It’s too identical. It’s not going to happen.”

—”He’s been very inconsistent on his positions. He’s been on both sides of the abortion issue, on both sides of the issue with same-sex marriage … he was for the TARP bill, the $700 billion bailout and the global warming initiatives.”

NOW:

—”I am endorsing Gov. Mitt Romney for president of the United States, a man who will preserve the American dream of prosperity and liberty.”

—”This is what victory looks like.” Campaigning with Romney in Portsmouth, Va., on the day she endorsed him.

—”He’s very smart. He has a very optimistic message. Women trust him because they see, this is a man who started a business from scratch, for heaven’s sake.”

—”One thing that Mitt Romney has demonstrated, he will repeal Obamacare. That’s a big compare and contrast between Barack Obama. We will never get rid of socialized medicine, which is Obamacare, under Barack Obama. Mitt Romney has committed himself to repealing Obamacare. … A lot of people know Mitt Romney’s positive agenda.”

___

RICK PERRY

If he couldn’t have the GOP nomination himself, Perry still wasn’t about to back Romney. As he dropped out of the race, the Texas governor endorsed Gingrich. He didn’t come around to endorsing Romney until Gingrich announced last month that he was planning to drop out.

THEN:

—”While you were the governor of Massachusetts in that period of time, you were 47th in the nation in job creation. … You failed as the governor of Massachusetts.”

—”If you are a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina to tell you he feels your pain. Because he caused it.”

—”I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he’d have enough of them to hand out.”

NOW:

—”Mitt Romney has earned the Republican presidential nomination through hard work, a strong organization and a disciplined message of restoring America after nearly four years of failed, job-killing policies from President Obama and his administration.”

___

JON HUNTSMAN

The former Utah governor endorsed Romney at the same time he dropped out of the race in January, but there was no joint appearance.

THEN:

—”You can’t be a perfectly lubricated weather vane on the important issues of the day.”

—”Gov. Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.”

—”When you combine a record of uncertainty — running first as a senator, as a liberal; governor as a moderate; then as a conservative for the presidency, people wonder where your core is.”

—”He’s been on three sides of every major issue of the day. And because of that it’s going to be very tough in the end to be able to make that trust argument to the American people.”

NOW:

—”It is now time for our party to unite around the candidate best equipped to defeat Barack Obama. Despite our differences and the space between us on some of the issues, I believe that candidate is Gov. Mitt Romney.”

—”I think he’s the best equipped by far to deal with the economic issues and challenges that confront us. … He’s grown a lot, he’s learned a lot. He’s probably better prepared to lead.”

___

RON PAUL

The scrappy Texas congressman was the last man standing among Romney’s GOP opponents, and he’s not ready to make nice yet. Paul announced this week that he won’t campaign anymore, but he’s still collecting delegates at state party conventions and could give Romney grief at the national nominating convention in Tampa, Fla., come August. Paul ran some scorching ads against Romney earlier this year but shied away from going after Romney in person.

THEN:

—Narrator in Ron Paul radio ad: “Mitt Romney can’t fight against Obamacare because he supported the same mandates and government takeovers as governor of Massachusetts. Romney can’t stand up against more bailouts because he supported them. He can’t lead the charge to shrink the government because he has grown it. Romney’s record is liberal and putting him up against Obama is a recipe for defeat.”

NOW:

—”Not soon.” Paul’s answer when he asked Tuesday when he’ll endorse Romney.

___

Associated Press writer Jack Gillum contributed to this report.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, Paul declined to endorse Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who endorsed Paul in 2008. Johnson was, formerly, the Republican presidential candidate all those young “liberal” college stoner Ron Paul supporters should have gone with if they’d wanted to support a candidate who believed strongly in liberty but who wasn’t a racist Alex Jonesian conspiracy-mongering goldbug loon. But Johnson had “extensive executive experience” instead of a blimp and a sweet logo, so he did not win over many Paul fanatics.

Ron Paul’s strategy seems to be a gradual takeover of the Republican Party itself, instead of attempting to build a Libertarian alternative to the GOP. I think he’ll find that he can get the party to happily sign on, at least rhetorically, to his fiscal message, as they continue to ignore his popular and populist isolationism and his eminently agreeable but politically untenable positions on criminal justice and civil liberties, forever. The party, in other words, will continue to co-opt whatever they find electorally useful about the Paul phenomenon, as the Tea Party movement stole his iconography and messaging wholesale while attaching it to the same religious-right/nativist sentiment that has driven the party’s activist base for decades.

But Paul thinks the future lies with his son Rand, who shares many of his father’s enthusiasms and beliefs while also appearing to be more acceptable to the mainstream. Various Paul allies and a few other Republicans strongly suggest that Rand is gearing up for a 2016 run; which would mean, of course, that they expect Romney to lose, but that they need to not appear to be rooting for Romney to lose.

The problem is that what makes Rand Paul more acceptable to the mainstream of the Republican Party is what makes him more repellent than his father. Take, for example, Rand Paul’s funny joke this last weekend about Barack Obama and gay marriage.

The president recently weighed in on marriage. And, you know, he said his views were evolving on marriage. Call me cynical but I wasn’t sure that his views on marriage could get any gayer. Now it did kind of bother me, though, that he used the justification for it in a biblical reference. He said the biblical Golden Rule caused him to be for gay marriage …

And I’m like: What version of the Bible is he reading? It’s not the King James version. It’s not the New American Standard. It’s not the New Revised version. I don’t know what version he is getting it from.

Haha Barack Obama is so gay, he should read a Bible for once. Libertarianism!

Nick Gillespie, of the libertarian Reason Magazine, does not get this joke. The crowd, at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, did seem to get it, or at least they appreciated it. But Rand sounds very different when he speaks to Iowa conservatives than he does when interviewed by Gillespie and Matt Welch. (His address received a nice notice from Robert Costa of the National Review, who did not mention his funny joke.)

While Rand Paul may be, as Gillespie says, the most libertarian senator, he is also not an actual libertarian, as demonstrated by his support for anti-constitutional anti-immigrant legislation and his very vocal antiabortion position. He is also a dumb lout, and I tend to think that having the Senate’s most libertarian member be a dumb lout is not actually that good for the Libertarian movement. When he makes explicitly libertarian arguments, he makes them dumbly. When he goes all anti-gay talk-radio bigot culture warrior, which he does increasingly frequently, he does so dumbly. (If he wants to be a mainstream politician and presidential contender, it was certainly dumb to appear — more than once — on the radio program of Truther/Birther/New World Orderer/every-other-conspiracy promoter Alex Jones, but for some reason he almost entirely escaped mainstream press scrutiny for these appearances.) While I don’t feel much affection for Ron Paul, he seems both significantly smarter and leagues more principled than his son the senator.

If the “electable” face of libertarianism is a fratty anti-gay, anti-choice nitwit like Rand Paul, I will stick with socialism, thank you. And I wonder if the Paul family’s plan is to promote “liberty” or to promote the Paul family.

But most GOP primary voters probably didn’t know this. Fischer came to the race with little money or name recognition and spent virtually all of the campaign toiling the shadows of her two better-known opponents. The Palin endorsement came just a week before the primary, giving Fischer a sudden jolt at just the right time. It may be that all Republican voters really knew about her was that she was a rancher and a conservative (per the ads she ran), that she had Palin’s support, and that she wasn’t her rivals. And that was enough to pull out a victory that no one saw coming.

So even if Fischer isn’t a classic Tea Party conservative, she still managed to tap into the same basic aversion to establishment figures and appetite for outsiders that has produced some seismic GOP primary upsets in the Tea Party-era. And the fact that it comes just a week after six-term Senator Richard Lugar was crushed by 20 points in an Indiana primary underscores how severely the power of Republican incumbents and establishment heavyweights to beat back primary challenges has been reduced.

There could be some more Nebraska-like upsets in Senate primaries this year, but no other sitting senator is expected to be denied re-nomination as Lugar was. But 2014, when 13 more Republican senators are due to face the voters, could be a different story. After 2010, when primary season chaos derailed the GOP’s hopes of winning back the Senate, there was hope among the party’s establishment that the base’s restiveness would die down and that order would be restored. That hasn’t happened, obviously, so it’s probably time to look at which Republican senators should be – and probably are – sweating the most about ’14:

Lindsey Graham (South Carolina): Graham, a long-time irritant to national conservative leaders, is the face of the compromise-friendly approach to governing that the GOP base is revolting against. And South Carolina is arguably ground zero for the Tea Party revolt, home of Sen. Jim DeMint and the “four horsemen” quartet of true believer House freshmen. Any of them could be a viable primary foe against Graham (and one of them, Trey Gowdy, already beat an incumbent, then-Rep. Bob Inglis, by 42 points in a 2010 primary). Graham has said he expects to get a primary challenge, which seems inarguable.

Saxby Chambliss (Georgia): Chambliss, too, says he expects a primary. His voting record is reliably conservative (a career mark of over 90 percent from the ACU), but he was part of the bipartisan Gang of 6 deficit reduction negotiations last year and argued that tax increases had “to be part of the mix.”

Lamar Alexander (Tennessee): His reputation as a moderate has never quite matched up with his voting record, but the 71-year-old Alexander seems cut from the same cloth as Lugar – collegial manner, lots of talk of cooperation with the other side, occasional breaks with party orthodoxy, and a voting record that’s reliably Republican overall. But his age, his image, and his decades in state and national politics (he was governor from 1979 to 1987 and ran for president in 1996 and 2000) make him particularly vulnerable to an anti-establishment uprising. Alexander could take some consolation from the fact that his fellow Tennessee senator, Bob Corker, escaped a serious primary challenge this year.

Mitch McConnell (Kentucky): One of McConnell’s biggest humiliations came in 2010, when he threw his vaunted home state political operation behind Trey Grayson, only to watch his protégé lose the GOP Senate primary to Rand Paul. A five-term incumbent, the 70-year-old McConnell reeks of Washington insiderdom, so there’s plenty of speculation that he’ll be a primary season target. But there’s good news for McConnell: Paul is now on board with his ’14 reelection effort, and other veterans of Paul’s ’10 campaign are sending similar signals. For now, McConnell seems to be in good shape, but as the Senate’s GOP leader, there’s always a chance his fingerprints will end up on a legislative compromise that infuriates the base.

Pat Roberts (Kansas): He’s old (76) and has been on Capitol Hill for 32 years – the first 16 in the House and the last 16 in the Senate. He’s also a quiet, behind-the-scenes player whose voting record is only now evolving to synch up with the GOP base’s prevailing mood. It wouldn’t be too hard for an opponent to portray Roberts as a tired insider with Potomac Fever. Plus, the Kansas Republican Party is unusually prone to civil war. Roberts could provide an inviting target for, say, Kris Kobach, the youthful Kansas secretary of state who has become the leading national voice of the anti-immigration right.

Thad Cochran (Mississippi): This marks Cochran’s 40^th year in Congress. He was elected to the House in 1972, then replaced James Eastland in the Senate in 1978. At the time, Cochran was a trailblazer, the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a statewide race in Mississippi. But the post-civil rights migration of southern white voters to the GOP is now complete, and today Cochran is one of many. If anything, he hasn’t kept pace, with a voting record that’s not quite as conservative as where his party is. A bigger problem, though, could be Cochran’s fondness for earmarks, a key marker of insider-ness in today’s GOP. Cochran might be higher on this list if it weren’t for his weak fundraising and noncommittal answers about running again – strong hints that he’ll end up calling it a career at 77 years old.

Susan Collins (Maine): Collins’ voting record places her decidedly to the left of her GOP colleagues and Maine was home to one of the Tea Party’s signature 2010 triumphs – Paul LePage’s out-of-nowhere gubernatorial primary win (which was followed up by a narrow November victory). Collins, who was first elected in 1996, could be vulnerable if a challenger emerges, but it’s not clear one will – just consider the failure of the grassroots to mobilize against Olympia Snowe before Snowe’s unexpected retirement announcement earlier this year. Plus, Maine loves independents – it’s elected two of them governor since the 1970s, nearly anointed a third in 2010, and is on its way to sending one (Angus King) to the Senate this year. Collins may have the same insurance policy that was always there for Snowe: If things get too rough in her own party, the option of an independent bid will be there.

Obviously, this is a preliminary and speculative list. Some of these Republicans may end up coasting in 2014, and others who aren’t mentioned could find themselves in unforeseen peril.

What’s really worth watching is how the fear of a primary challenge weighs on all of their actions in the Senate going forward. How many of them will mimic Orrin Hatch – who was so spooked by the ’10 defeat of his fellow Utah Republican, Bob Bennett, that he reinvented himself as an abrasive, compromise-hating partisan warrior? Hatch’s primary is in six weeks – and he’s expected to survive.

With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration agenda that President Obama promises to pursue if he defeats Romney in November. Second, the reforms the 43-year-old first-term Republican favors are opposed by every Republican member of the Senate (even those like John McCain, who used to support it) and a solid majority in the House. (In case there was any doubt, the same day Martinez’s interview appeared, Politico reported that the Romney campaign was seeking a “boring white guy” as a running mate.)

Martinez had previously said she wasn’t interested in a place on the Republican ticket. Her comments certainly indicate she isn’t interested in the public posturing necessary to achieve it.

On immigration reform, Martinez said she favors:

an approach “with multiple levels”: increased border security; deportation for criminals; a guest-worker program for people who want “to go freely back and forth across the border to work”; a DREAM Act-style pathway to citizenship, through the military or college, for children brought here illegally by their parents; and a visa (coupled with a “penalty” or a “tagback”) that allows rest of the illegal population to remain in the U.S. while they follow standard naturalization procedures.

In conversation, Martinez slagged Romney’s advocacy of “self-deportation” for the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the United States.

“‘Self-deport?’ What the heck does that mean?” she snapped.

Martinez is not the only person asking. As articulated by Romney during the primary season,”self-deportation” means making life so miserable for the undocumented that they will “voluntarily” leave the country. Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and Romney advisor, told me he thought the United States could remove 5.5 million “illegal aliens” by the end of the first Romney administration.

As John McCain and others have pointed out, a GOP campaign promise to forcibly evict millions of Americans from their homes is neither attractive nor practical as an appeal to Latino voters, the fastest-growing group in the American electorate.

Martinez suggested Romney needed a more attractive message.

“I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign,” she said. “But now there’s an opportunity for Governor Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why.”

Impolitic to the end, Martinez expressed skepticism about Sen. Marco Rubio’s much-hyped but still vague idea of GOP variation on the DREAM Act. Rubio, with Romney’s tacit blessing, is seeking to moderate the Republicans’ reputation on immigration by developing a DREAM Act-style measure that would protect undocumented young people from deportation without giving them citizenship.

Politicians, Martinez said, cannot “fix [immigration] by saying, ‘Here’s the DREAM Act and we’re done.’ It has to be part of a larger plan.”

In other words, the New Mexico governor is that now-rare national Republican figure who favors comprehensive immigration reform, otherwise known as amnesty. Martinez would open the illegal immigrant’s path to citizenship that Marco Rubio avoids and that most Republicans seek to block. She probably won’t be Mitt Romney’s running mate. But Susana Martinez will be heard.

Whereas losing presidential candidates usually have their pick of well-paying sinecures, their consultants and flacks will need to preserve their reputations just well enough to get the next job. And so, especially near the end of campaigns, we get the anonymous leaks, recriminations and dramatic tales of late-night internal bickering in dim penthouse chambers that fuel Politico ebooks and “definitive” postmortems like “Game Change.” Political consultants are never heroes, but some, usually those with fresh book deals but lacking in fresh narratives, will attempt to portray them that way. As the two Politico e-books released during Republican primary season already indicate, this election cycle’s process of finger-pointing — which consultant is most responsible for making Rick Perry “look” incompetent, for example — is already well underway.

So let’s try to tell the stories of the various campaign apparatchiks before the post-November mythologizing pushes all other narratives into the black hole of deleted history. We’re going to bring you all the dirty tales of consultants, flacks and operatives connected to the Obama or Romney campaigns, showcasing all the kneecapping and fingerprinting and complaining that makes them the Great Minds that they are today. We’ll start with Romney’s personal slave, senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom.

– – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – –

It’s a tough call, but the most depressing thing we’ve seen in this early general election season is esteemed Romney and Obama senior advisers Eric Fehrnstrom and David Axelrod’s penchant for trading juvenile, unfunny barbs on Twitter. This is how they spend their time, now, at the pinnacle of their political consulting careers. On April 14, for example, Fehrnstrom tweeted, “By not condemning Bill Maher, @davidaxelrod is signaling to supporters it’s OK to keep up the attacks on Ann Romney. Shame.” Axelrod replied, “@EricFehrn So until you have the guts to stand up to one of your own, you can take your studied outrage and stick it in…your Swiss bank!” This routine is beyond sad.

Much has been written about Axelrod both before and after his candidate won the 2008 election, the moment that crowned him as the reigning brilliant tactical genius of our time. But much less is known about his junior Twitter sparring partner, Eric Fehrnstrom, the challenger to his title.

Like Axelrod and countless others, Fehrnstrom learned the craft of professional trivial assholery in his previous career as a political journalist. He covered the police beat and state politics at the conservative Boston Herald for a decade. Former Herald editor Kevin Convey, sharing his memories of then-Romney communications director Eric Fehrnstrom in a 2008 Boston Phoenix profile, described his former colleague thusly: “My father used to talk about ‘pig-headed Swedes.’ Eric was a pig-headed Swede in the best sense of the term.” Which is exactly what the Herald, which has long considered it its divine duty to destroy Massachusetts Democrats’ careers and lives, wanted.

As Fehrnstrom himself wrote in Boston Magazine years later, his finest journalistic moment involved snapping a photo of Democratic lady on vacation in Florida. It’s scoops like these that show you precisely how thin the line between ideological tabloid writer and partisan campaign flack can be:

In December 1989, when the commonwealth was in the grip of a bitter cold snap and a fiscal crisis, the lieutenant governor, Evelyn Murphy, was on vacation in Florida. Since she was the candidate for governor, it could be argued that she belonged on freezing Beacon Hill, wrestling the state’s finances into shape. … So we lined her up for a kill shot. I jumped on a southbound plane with a photographer, and we staked out Murphy on Sanibel Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. We found her soon enough, jogging along a road in shorts and a T-shirt. The next day, we splashed her picture across page one, her middle-aged thighs flouncing across more than 300,000 newspapers. It was a terribly unflattering photograph, an image that became one of those iconic campaign symbols, like when Mike Dukakis rode in that tank with a helmet strapped to his head, looking for all the Flying Squirrel, only more dour.

Ah, those halcyon days, when men were men and Democrats were Michael Dukakis and Evelyn Murphy, sitting ducks who’d soon find themselves ruined at the snap of an “unflattering” photo. But that chapter ended when Fehrnstrom accepted a buyout from the Herald’s new owner, who according to him planned to “‘de-emphasize’ political stories, in 1994. He showed signs of remorse for his journalistic dirty work in that same 1999 essay lambasting reporters:

They write the same stories again and again, quoting the same pollsters and pundits, often migrating into Sunday-morning punditry themselves. After a while, they run on automatic. They even stop doing their own research, instead relying on political operatives who package stories for them, complete with photo ops and spin or, worse, blind quotes and low tips.

I was guilty of that, too. Hey, I was the guy who caught middle-aged, heavy-thighed Evelyn Murphy jogging down a Florida road in the middle of her winter vacation—exactly the kind of gotcha story that makes me wince when I see it now.

So Fehrnstrom, having made a name for himself by hyping trivial stories about liberal politicians’ personal lives, decided to change careers. Henceforth, he would protect conservative politicians from journalists who wanted to hype trivial stories about their personal lives. He got his first job in politics as an aide to Massachusetts state treasurer and 1998 Republican gubernatorial candidate Joe Malone. It was there that he began honing the skills that have endeared him to Romney.

Ambitious Massachusetts GOP politicians frequently deal with a unique problem in that party’s politics that, thanks to Fehrnstrom’s current boss, the whole country is now familiar with: Whether to be pro-choice or pro-life, and how to flip back and forth between those positions depending on the circumstances of an election cycle. From the June 22, 1994 Boston Globe:

State Treasurer Joseph D. Malone, long a champion of the state’s antiabortion movement, announced publicly last night that he has changed from an opponent to a supporter of abortion rights.

Malone, a rising Republican star in a state where opposition to abortion rights is considered a political liability, now supports both a woman’s right to an abortion and public funding of abortions, according to his spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom.

“A woman’s right to an abortion is the law of the land, and Joe supports the law of the land,” said Fehrnstrom. “Joe believes this should no longer be a political issue.”

Fehrnstrom’s eloquently fake explanation for Malone’s “conversion” also eerily brings to mind President Obama’s eloquently fake explanation for his own recent “conversion” to supporting same-sex marriage: “There has been a gradual evolution in Joe’s thinking on the subject.” A decent-enough line is a decent-enough line, no matter the party.

Alas, Malone’s gubernatorial bid was unsuccessful, and Fehrnstrom took his slick liar skills to their natural home in the private sector, the advertising industry, where he wrote press releases about the delicious new “spicy” menu at Popeye’s. His ability to lie on behalf of his employer must have caught Romney’s eye: In 2002, the candidate offered him a job on his gubernatorial campaign. Fehrnstrom’s been with Romney in some capacity ever since.

By all accounts, Fehrnstrom’s most important role on Team Romney has been to prevent the hilariously awkward candidate from ever talking to anyone, because that automatically leads to problems. “He wasn’t so much Romney’s press secretary as his bodyguard,” an “old friend” told GQ in a recent profile of Fehrnstrom, whose author added, “Once Romney was elected, he became even less accessible, with Fehrnstrom literally setting up velvet ropes around the governor’s office to keep reporters at bay.” It wasn’t just the reporters. Shortly after Romney took control, Fehrnstrom went on New England Cable News and picked a fight — an actual fight, with the shoving and the tussling and whatnot — with a local mayor who’d been hollering about Romney for some time. It’s confrontations like these that earned Fehrnstrom his reputation as, in GQ’s words, “Romney’s balls.” Fehrnstrom will wave you away if you offered him this … compliment. But privately, he, like all other consultants, enjoys the reputation of the tough-guy enforcer, or testicle-having bulldog monster, or whatever the poison pens run with on any given day.

So that’s been Fehrnstrom’s last decade: Containing Romney’s natural clueless clumsiness as much as possible and, when breached, trying his best to spin such behavior into something resembling goofy charm. When Romney directly contradicts his past positions on abortion, climate change, the auto bailout,, it’s Fehrnstrom’s job to come up with the impossible exculpatory line and deliver it to the press with a straight face. When Romney gives in to any of his grating tone-deaf rich-people pleasures, like flying on a private jet owned by Pfizer en route to a Republican Governors Association meeting, Fehrnstrom comes out and says, this is no big deal, why do you all think this is a big deal? When a reporter magically finds himself face-to-face with Romney and gets the opportunity to call him out on his lies, Fehrnstrom cuts it off and berates the reporter, “Act professionally. Act professionally! Don’t be argumentative with the candidate.” (Although it’s best that to not get caught doing this on camera.)

In his rare non-Romney free time, Fehrnstrom — who started his own consulting firm after Romney’s 2008 loss — serves as chief strategist to Sen. Scott Brown’s reelection campaign. This, better than anything else, shows you the “convictions” from which these strident consultants folks select clients: His job with one client is to convince the electorate that Scott Brown is just communist enough to deserve reelection in Massachusetts; his other is to prove that Mitt Romney is a “severe conservative” who’s prepared to destroy the world, if that’s what it takes. His one job is to demand six years worth of tax returns from Brown’s Senate challenger Elizabeth Warren; his other is to refuse to release more than two years’ worth of Mitt Romney’s.(Fehrnstrom’s other serious duties for Brown include writing secret fake Twitter accounts of Brown’s possible challengers, penning missives like “I promise to devote all my time in office to making gay videos. Shame on Scott Brown for focusing on jobs!’’ until he gets outed.)

Romney appreciates few things more than Fehrnstrom’s grimy, bellicose loyalty, and that’s probably the only reason he’s still around after making that infamous Etch-a-Sketch gaffe on national television a few weeks ago. But Romney’s rewarded him several times throughout his career. In 2005, according to a Boston Phoenix profile written a few years later, Fehrnstrom took over the Romney spokesperson job after the previous occupant, operative Julie Teer, had “lost a behind-the-scenes battle with Fehrnstrom.” (Like most washed-up Republican operatives, Teer is now a vice president at the Susan G. Komen Foundation.) And then there was this lovely pension-snagging post that Romney bestowed upon his good friend, at least for a couple of days until it became the scandal that it obviously would become. From the same Phoenix profile:

A controversy toward the close of Romney’s gubernatorial term made much the same point. In November 2006, the Globe reported that Romney had appointed Fehrnstrom to the Brookline Housing Authority. The posting itself wasn’t lucrative (it paid only $5000 annually), but it would have made Fehrnstrom eligible for a state pension when he reached retirement age. And given his salary history — at the time, Fehrnstrom reportedly was making $160,000 — that pension would have been a whopper. (In Massachusetts, pensions are set by the recipients’ three highest earning years.)

Fehrnstrom has spent ten years taking bullets for Mitt Romney, and in a few months time, he’ll either be remembered in political nerd history as the most brilliant tactical strategist of our time or the incompetent moron who didn’t know what he was doing and singlehandedly ruined Mitt Romney’s shot at the presidency. In the meantime, don’t expect to hear much crowing from Fehrnstrom directly. That would be poor consulting work on behalf of a client. Only expect to hear it, and plenty of it, indirectly, following the insiders’ unique moral code.

While researching this piece, for example, I kept coming across the same line in several pieces about Fehrnstrom: that he had come up with the devastating debate line that put Newt Gingrich out of contention in January’s Florida primary but refused to take credit in the media. Yet if he was refusing to take credit in the media, then why did I keep reading about how this was his idea?

It’s funny how they work.