One of the peculiar features of modern elections is the campaign conference call with the political press. It’s like the bastard child of the press conference and the press release, a talking press release if you will.

They rarely if ever feature the candidate. Campaign aides and flacks usually take the lead. But there’s a subset of these calls in which specific issue-area experts stand in, and those are the ones that can get a little unpredictable. For the Romney campaign, they’ve been especially unpredictable and oddly gaffe-prone for a campaign that by virtually every metric is professionally and tightly run.

David Kurtz

David Kurtz is Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of Talking Points Memo where he oversees the news operations of TPM and its sister sites.