Back in early February, I speculated that Mitt Romney’s march to the Republican nomination might be derailed by his keen ability to create high negative valence moments. Video comments that reference how many Cadillacs his wife drives or how many NASCAR owners he knows can spread around the Web like wildfire and reinforce memes about candidates that are difficult to undo.
Daily Kos

The latest of these high negative valence moments is not a comment from Romney himself, but from one of his senior aides comparing his candidacy to an Etch-a-Sketch:

Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

This probably is just a bump in the road, but if it comes to anything, it is because clips and parodies like the photoshopped Etch-a-Sketch above traveling through our personal and virtual networks lock in an idea of Mitt Romney as malleable. But then again, this isn’t news to anyone who as been paying attention.