On Tuesday, Mitt Romney’s campaign rushed to put out the latest flip flop fire: a 2002 video posted to YouTube featuring then-gubernatorial candidate Romney declaring his views “progressive” and bragging that he’s not a “partisan Republican.”
“The very last thing the Democrats want to do is run against Mitt Romney,” spokeswoman Andrea Saul told Slate’s Dave Weigel. “That is why they are focused on his campaign and not on the economy. The Democrats are continuing their campaign of deception in their strategy to ‘kill Romney.'”
Saul was right that Democrats were happy to have the clip, at least. The DNC quickly cut it into a web video on Romney’s flip flops and blasted it out to reporters. She was, however, very wrong about its source. It wasn’t a Democrat who dug up the video and pushed it into the AM news at all, but a 22-year old Republican amateur, Andrew Kaczynski, whose opposition research has been popping up all over the race in recent weeks.
“I saw their response was the kind of spin you usually get when something damaging comes out: ‘Dems aren’t focusing on Obama’s record,” Kaczynski told TPM over the phone. “I was just like, I found this video and I’m not a Democrat, and I’m doing this as a hobby. I thought it was kind of funny.”
His latest video ended up driving the day as Republicans leapt on it too: the Perry campaign put out a blistering statement saying Romney “pursued plenty of progressive policies as governor, including notably raising business taxes, the individual mandate to purchase health insurance and global warming policies.”
Kaczynski, a history undergrad at St. John’s University in New York, has been digging through C-SPAN archives, YouTube, and Google Video for the last several weeks unearthing embarrassing footage of not just Romney, but several candidates. A 2005 clip he discovered of Newt Gingrich defending an individual mandate at a forum with Hillary Clinton caused a stir last month, for example. He scored another big hit earlier this month with a truly painful video from the 2004 Republican convention in which Governor Mitt Romney, before his rebirth as a movement conservative, slammed Democratic nominee John Kerry as a serial flip-flopper for five straight minutes.
“In politics it’s pretty much standard operating procedure that when you’re running for office you look at your opponent’s record, you find some place where he or she has changed position, and you say they’re a flip flopper, and thats a pretty standard thing,” Romney said in the clip. “But in this case, this guy really is!”
Kaczynski says he’s “neutral” in the current race, but spends more time digging up dirt on the frontrunners if only because they’re more relevant.
“I wanted to give people another perspective that you usually don’t get to see, so they can see how they’ve evolved on certain issues, whether they changed their core convictions when it’s politically convenient,” he said.
His YouTube account, which is rapidly becoming a must-follow for political reporters, is a recent invention — he only launched it in October. But even before then his video skills made headlines: a clip he found of David Weprin, the Democratic nominee in the NY-9 special election, dancing awkwardly at a Caribbean event ended up all over political news sites.
“I put that online and it got like 20,000 views in one day,” he said. “After that I realized trolling through the internet I can find worthy stuff that maybe has slipped through the cracks.”
Kaczynski ended up interning with the eventual winner, Republican Bob Turner, in his district office in Queens. When it comes to his impending graduation, however, he says he’s leaning more towards journalism than a career as a political operative.
“I’m not really interested in the governing aspect of politics,” he said. “I find the journalism aspect of covering it a lot more entertaining than the actual process.”
In the meantime, however, he’s enjoying his odd niche as the Republican primaries’ most influential amateur opposition researcher.
“I think it’s kind of cool it can influence the presidential election from my couch,” he said.
