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"And one of the rules we had was we were going to have fun. The first rule was every meeting had to begin with a joke. And it took some work to find jokes." --Mitt Romney in a 2008 Time interview.
Yesterday was one of those days where Mitt tried to be funny. The robotically-slick candidate and his team pranked Obama's Chicago headquarters: they sent a few scraps of leftover deep dish pizza to their rivals. That's it. It wasn't a particularly hearty joke. But it bears all the hallmarks of classic Romney humor: safe stabs at casual banter that mostly feel like they were conceived in a conference room.
Since we're going to be hearing lots of such jokes from the recently re-activated Romney campaign in the year a ahead, we'd like to present a mini-guide to the type of jokes that Mitt relies on during the stump season.
Liberal Jokes (To Prove He's a Real Conservative)
Being labeled a political shape-shifter means that Romney has to go out of his way to reassert his conservative credentials. One of the easiest ways to do that is by pretending he was a marginalized conservative as Governor in liberal Massachusetts. All the way back in 2005, The Washington Post noted this still-current tendency to throw his former state under the bus. Typical example: "Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts...is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention."