Overheard from David Corn’s office at Mother Jones's headquarters today: “I gave him the 47% Romney video and then he plagiarizes “Romnesia” from me?!” From June 2012:
And today, from the Guardian:
The Obama campaign is running on women's issues for a third day in a row, but this has been its most successful day yet. Attempting to encapsulate what it claims to be Mitt Romney's shifting positions on a number of issues, the president's team has hit on a catchy phrase: "Romnesia".So far, no mentions of "Romnesia" on Mother Jones today. Maybe a long lunch with their lawyers?
Obama unveiled the new noun during a speech to students at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, claiming that Romney had forgotten earlier positions in which he had opposed equal pay for women and easily-available contraception and had supported outlawing abortion.
The potency of the phrase was evident in the response of the audience, which laughed and cheered on first hearing on it and as Obama riffed on it in the remainder of his speech.
It quickly became clear "Romnesia" was not just a throwaway line, as the Obama campaign followed up within minutes. Obama's campaign manager, Jim Messina, tweeted that Obama "diagnoses Romney's failure to recall his extreme stances on women's issues".
UPDATE: About 25 minutes after I tweeted David Corn for a reaction, Mother Jones posted a response (1:50 PDT, 4:50 EDT). They opted for magnanimity:
On Friday, President Barack Obama launched a new attack on his opponent, charging that the Republican presidential case suffers from "Romnesia..."
Romnesia—several months ago our David Corn deployed the same term in an article headlined, "A Case of Romnesia"...
Corn, who described several instances of Romnesia in that piece, may not have been the first to coin the term, but he was an early adapter. You can watch the president embrace this diagnosis here...
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