SNL defends Romney

It is true that good, bad, or indifferent, how a candidate is portrayed on late night television can, in time, have a strong influence on the public perception of his actual character. It has been said that in the age of the twenty four hour news cycle that no former Vice President will become President again. When one looks at the caricatures that have been made of Dan Quayle, Al Gore, Dick Cheney, and in this administration Joe Biden one can see that this might well be true. There are many reasons for this which perhaps I will go into in a future column but what this means is that broadcasts such as SNL can have a disproportionate amount of influence.

This is why what happened Saturday night is fairly significant. On the traditional Weekend Update segment " Ann Romney" appeared. The real Ann Romney had some trouble last week when she beseeches Republicans criticizing her husband and the race he is running to be nicer and to understand that this ( running for President) " is hard."

The actress playing Romney portrayed her as most do as a former beauty who is a bit vacant and one hundred percent dedicated to her husband. What was interesting in the skit was that fake Ann said what perhaps, in retrospect, real Ann should have or wished she had been allowed to say. That is, to all those on the right saying that this race was a chip shot and that Obama should have been easy to defeat, that one might wonder if the race was so easily winnable why the big names such as Jeb Bush and Chris Christie did not enter the race.

This was a true statement. One would hope that it might make some Republicans feel ashamed of their criticisms. What is truth is that for many on the right, a Romney win would increase their time frames for running for President for four years. It is, for these people, a delicate act proclaiming that Romney should win, wishing him not to, and then being ready to position themselves for the next race.

Perhaps, just once, Mitt should understand what Obama does. Obama consistently aggravates the left of his party knowing that they have no place else to go in terms of voting. If Romney would have the fabled Sister Soulja moment on his own party, on those in the extreme right, he would find independents flocking to him and again, after all, where would the right go. They hate Obama, they have always planned to hold their nose and vote for Romney, nothing that he could say would make that better or worse.

This is why SNL's segment was important in a way beyond ht norm. Inadvertently they showed Romney the only way he can perhaps win, that is to rebuke his own party for their extremeity. The question is can Mitt at this point go off script.