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.
