(HOST) For veteran A-B-C News correspondent and commentator Bill Seamans, a certain recent twist in the national political debate is sounding a bit like deja-vue – all over again.
(SEAMANS) This is the prime season for avid political junkies. They also are known as PJ’s for short. They are experts at reading the nuance and assessing the politician’s deniable credibility. They are said to enjoy parsing the meaning of, or the intent of, words used in the electoral foreplay called rhetorical jousting. What did he or she really mean?
Veteran PJ’s will recall, I’m sure, when the nation was gripped by parsing fever back when President Clinton tried to rationalize his scandalous Oval Office behavior. Remember how he challenged us to fathom what the real meaning of the word "IS" is?
So it is with great relief that PJ’s have in recent days been made aware that the political parsing game is surviving – that it is showing up alive and well in this caucus and primary season.
The slumbering parsing game was wakened by Republican presidential wannabe Mitt Romney when, in a major speech this month, he said that as a child he SAW his father, George Romney, when he was governor of Michigan in the 1960’s, march with Martin Luther King in Detroit. He repeated the story when questioned by Tim Russert on Meet the Press.
Since then, the Detroit Free Press and other media sources have said that they could find no report in their files of Mitt’s father marching with Martin Luther King. And the editor of the Martin Luther King papers at Stanford University told the Boston Globe – in her words – "I researched this question and, indeed, it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King."
Now all of this has launched the latest parsing challenge based on what the word "saw" really means. Mitt Romney has explained that while he said he saw his father marching with King he never actually saw his father marching with King.
He said that he used the word "saw" in the figurative sense. He said, and I quote, "I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great civil rights effort."
Trouble is, Romney did not include that caveat in his speech nor in his comments to Tim Russert which left the impression that he was saying that his father, Mayor George Romney, actually did walk alongside Martin Luther King in a civil rights march.
And now his opponents are attacking Romney’s use of the word "saw" – even going so far as accusing him of outright lying – but I think the ultimate slash so far is the allegation that joining in the parsing game has made Mitt Romney sound so – as they say – Clintonesque.
Bill Seamans is a former correspondent and bureau chief for A-B-C News in the Middle East.