No, not this time. But we do have a story line that's riper and more grounded in reality for the "serial exaggerator" narrative the campaign press used to love so much.
Blue Mass Group does the honors:
Mitt Romney will stop at nothing to score political points. Even if it means lying outright about his father.
I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.
Uh huh.
He made a similar statement Sunday during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press." He said, "You can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was a tireless crusader for civil rights."
Right. Got it -- dad marched with MLK. Even David Broder says so, and supplies some corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. (BMG bonus points for identifying the source of that phrase!)
As Mitt Romney recalled in his address, his father was able to remind people that he had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. (through upscale Grosse Pointe, Mich., in support of open-housing legislation).
Problem is, it's not true. None of it. As the Phoenix's David Bernstein reveals ... in some superb digging, George Romney never marched "with" -- i.e., in the presence of, at the same place at the same time -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
And the capper:
Faced with the unfortunate reality that Mitt was making things up, his campaign has retreated into a hilarious Humpty-Dumptyism about what it means to "march with" someone. You see, it doesn't mean that you were actually there. It means that, well, you participated in a march about a related topic on a different day, and maybe you thought about the guy while you were doing it.
Mitt, in other words, was "speaking figuratively, not literally."
Oh. My. God. This jackass will literally say anything.
In other news, I "figuratively" wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Hammurabic Code.
UPDATE: For those interested in salvaging Romney's tale, here's an excerpt from the above-referenced Phoenix article:
This 1968 Grosse Pointe appearance is the one that Romney spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom initially insisted, in email exchanges with the Phoenix, was the event in question. Fehrnstrom cited the Broder column and "the Romney family recollection."
Of the many contemporaneous and historical records of the Grosse Pointe speech, none make any mention of George Romney’s attendance. It is unlikely, if not implausible, that his presence would have gone unnoticed: not only was he governor of the state, he had just, weeks before, dropped out of the race for President.
And, Mitt Romney would not have known about the event, let alone had a chance to "see" it. He was at that time in the middle of his two-year mission for the Mormon church in Le Havre, France. By his own description and others’, he was cut off from virtually all contact with his family; and at the time, King’s Grosse Pointe appearance was no more than local news.
And the Phoenix's own update:
A spokesperson for Mitt Romney now tells the Phoenix that George W. Romney and Martin Luther King Jr. marched together in June, 1963 -- although possibly not on the same day or in the same city.