Things have not been going very well for Paul Weyrich lately. First, he endorsed Mitt Romney for President, but when Romney was forced to drop out, he threw his support behind Mike Huckabee. Then, when Huckabee too dropped out, Weyrich apparently had a crisis of conscience and confessed his sins to his allies on the Right at a meeting in New Orleans last monthy:
Weyrich, a Romney supporter and one of those Farris had chastised for not supporting Huckabee, steered his wheelchair to the front of the room and slowly turned to face his compatriots. In a voice barely above a whisper, he said, "Friends, before all of you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong."
In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy.
In what was perceived to be a public act of penance for his earlier support of Romney, Weyrich signed on to an ad warning John McCain that the idea of naming Romney as his running mate was “utterly unacceptable” and that doing so would destroy the GOP’s long-standing ties with its right-wing base.
And that seemed to be the end of it … until The American Mind reported that Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation had quietly sent out a press release trying to distance Weyrich from the anti-Romney ad:
Recently I received a phone call from someone asking if former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney should be Arizona Senator John McCain’s selection for Vice President of the United States.
I said, “No” because I did not think this was the best path for Romney right now; nor was it, in my view, the right fit for McCain. My understanding was that this was to be a personal letter to the Senator; it was not clear to me that this was to be an advertisement.
Thus, I now request that my involvement in this effort be disregarded as this effort to influence the Senator moves on.
If Weyrich is to be believed, he either didn’t read the letter or didn’t know that it was going to be made public. Of course, even if that was the case, the text of the ad, with Weyrich’s signature attached, was made public a few days before it ran, giving him plenty of time to disavow it or demand that his name be removed. He did neither, choosing instead to furtively issue a press release to a conservative blog begging that his role in this entire imbroglio simply be "disregarded."
