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Christine Lauber, the older sister of Romney’s classmate, John Lauber, claims she has no knowledge of the bullying incident involving her brother, who passed away from liver cancer in 2004. When ABC News showed Christine the story, she became agitated and somewhat emotional.

“Even if it did happen, John probably wouldn’t have said anything,” she said. “If he were still alive today, he would be furious [about the story].”

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“The family of John Lauber is releasing a statement saying the portrayal of John is factually incorrect and we are aggrieved that he would be used to further a political agenda,” she said. “There will be no more comments from the family.”

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One of Mitt Romney’s closest friends and a high school classmate has been asked by the Romney campaign to come out and offer “supporting remarks” in defense of the candidate following a Washington Post article that described pranks at the Cranbrook School in the 1960s that focused on a student who was “presumed” to be gay. Romney has denied that the pranks were targeted.

Romney’s older brother Scott called White, asking him to act as a surrogate for Romney on their high school years. White, in an interview with ABC News, said that he is “still debating” whether he will help the campaign, remarking, “It’s been a long time since we’ve been pals.”

According to White, he knows of several other classmates that have also been approached by the campaign to counter the article. White declined to name the fellow classmates.

One former classmate and old friend of Romney’s – who refused to be identified by name – said there are “a lot of guys” who went to Cranbrook who have “really negative memories” of Romney’s behavior in the dorms. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/romney-friend-stu-white-s
ays-campaign-wants-him-to-counter-prank-accusations/ makes some valid observations on it:

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Perhaps Romney is being completely sincere. But the Post confirmed the story with five witnesses, four of whom described it on the record, so there seems little doubt about whether it occurred. They were deeply troubled by their participation in it, and recall it vividly to this day.

A candidate who has struggled with seeming human, as Mitt Romney has, could have done himself a favor by using this as an opportunity to show a little more of himself. He could have said: Yes, it happened. It was stupid and cruel. I wish I could go back and undo it. But part of growing up is realizing where you failed when you were young, and learning from your mistakes so you can become a better person.

Most importantly, Romney could have said something that indicated he had a conception of how horrible the assault must have been for John Lauber, the victim. His only mention of Lauber, who died in 2004, was to say "I had no idea what that individual's sexual orientation might be."

By referring to Lauber as "that individual" he makes Lauber a nameless figure, further distancing himself from the incident. Which is exactly the opposite of what he should have done. After all, it's the quality of empathy -- being able to see things from someone else's perspective and feel what they feel -- that Romney has had trouble convincing voters he possesses.

This problem comes up for Romney again and again, often in the form of "gaffes" that are usually taken out of context, but still reveal a tin ear for the lives people lead.

Perhaps Romney really doesn't remember the assault on John Lauber nearly a half-century ago, despite the fact that so many of the other people who were there have never forgotten it. Or perhaps he decided that claiming ignorance would be the safest course of crisis management. But what he said told people nothing about the man he is today and how he has changed and grown over that time. We're all different people than we were in our youth, and we all have regrets. The 17-year-old Mitt Romney may have been a privileged, entitled boy with a mean streak. The 65-year-old Mitt Romney missed an opportunity to convince us he's something different.

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I think that's very astute.

As to desperately trying to dig up something Obama did to minimize it, I'll just ask one thing: How many people did Obama's using cocaine hurt? The comparison is fallacious, in other words, and just one more attempt to find something, ANYTHING, to...I'm not sure what, actually. Except look foolish, which I'm sure wsn't the intent.

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Conservatives are hitting back at claims that Mitt Romney in 1965 terrorized a classmate who some presumed to be gay: President Obama was a bully, too!

Several right-leaning news outlets are pointing to an excerpt in the President's memoir, "Dreams from My Father," in which Obama details how he teased and shoved a middle school girl named Coretta — the only other black student in his grade.

"We have uncovered somebody who has actually admitted to engaging in real inappropriate behavior as a youth," Fox News host Sean Hannity said on Thursday evening.

The incident in question began when classmates during recess jeered that Obama was the girl's boyfriend.

Obama recounted in his 1995 book, "'She's not my g-girlfriend,' I stammered. I looked to Coretta for some assistance, but she just stood there looking down at the ground. 'Coretta's got a boyfriend! Why don't you kiss her, mister boyfriend?'"

He continued, "'I'm not her boyfriend!' I shouted. I ran up to Coretta and gave her a slight shove; she staggered back and looked up at me, but still said nothing. 'Leave me alone!' I shouted again. And suddenly Coretta was running, faster and faster, until she disappeared from sight. Appreciative laughs rose around me. Then the bell rang, and the teachers appeared to round us back into class."

Critics are contrasting the story with a report in the Washington Post in which witnesses described Romney bullying a suspected gay classmate when he was in high school. It came out a day after Obama publicly backed same-sex marriage.

According to the Post report, which the presumed Republican presidential nominee doesn't dispute, Romney led a pack of students to pin a boy down and forcibly cut his hair.

After the piece surfaced, Romney apologized, saying that while he doesn't remember all of his prep school "pranks," if "anyone was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize."

Conservative website Breitbart.com ran a headline accompanied with the Coretta passage, "Does WaPo know Obama shoved a little girl?" Right-leaning RedState.com and the National Review picked up on the Coretta story, too.

Hannity also declared Obama has a "worse record" of behavior, pointing to another excerpt in Obama's memoir in which he describes skipping classes, drinking beer and experimenting with drugs.

"That puts Romney and the bully issue to shame," Hannity argued.

Fox News' Kimberly Guilfoyle called the Washington Post story a "hit piece."

"They had to go back to the 1960s to try and find something bad to say about Mitt Romney," she said. "It's ridiculous — the lengths they’re going to, to try and taint him. They're obviously worried about his candidacy and they should be." http://www.nydailynews.com/news/election-2012/conservatives-counter-cl
aims-mitt-romney-a-bully-obama-worse-article-1.1076353 gotta giggle. It's exactly like our rightie here did, bringing up the cocaine. The difference is, Obama WROTE about what happened; Mitt claims he "doesn't remember". Cop out!

Amusingly, it's just as easy to picture what Obama described, only two African-American kids in the school, he's teased, embarrassed, there's no doubt embarrassment at being one of the only two in the school and being teased that she's his girlfriend, trying to deny it, being frustrated by her silence, pushing her to help him deny it--and I can just see the girl, embarrassed as hell, sensitive also to being one of only two African-Americans and being teased, running away from the situation.

AND it's so easy to see the campaign, desperately trying to get old classmates to support him, and reaching for SOMETHING to make Obama look worse. Plus the last bit is to laugh: "They had to go back to the 1960s to try and find something bad to say", when they just did PRECISELY the same thing!

Politics is funny--sad, but funny! The only serious thing about it, to me, is that bullying is still a very serious thing, and has caused suicides. Aside from the very relvant observations above, Romney could have made himself look SO much better if he'd used it to make a comment on bullying. Three or four misses there, in my opinion.

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Auto Mag does, however, quote Maxwell giving crucial details notably missing from the Post piece: “’I'm a Democrat, so I won't vote for him,’ says Maxwell. 'But he'd probably make a pretty good President. He's very smart, very principled.’”

The Post neglected to mention these relevant facts, just as it neglected to mention Maxwell’s skepticism about Romney’s religion as reported in the Auto Mag piece: “‘He’s determined to claim the highest office in the land--to be the first Mormon to do it. He keeps that undercover because he doesn’t want to frighten people.’”

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The Post also creates inferences about Romney that seem to be debunked in the Auto Mag article. Horowitz quotes Matthew Friedemann, the most vocally harsh critic on the Lauber haircutting, in a manner inferring that Romney was a snobbish kid who owned his own car: “When Romney left the campus on weekends, he never invited him. ‘I didn’t quite fit into the social circle. I didn’t have a car when I was 16,’ Friedemann said.”

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To summarize: two current articles based on interviews with some of the same former classmates. But they present two differing and largely inconsistent portraits, with Horowitz's Washington Post either failing to investigate, or deliberately omitting, crucial and relevant information revealed by Murray in Automobile Magazine about Romney's character in high school. It would seem that the Post’s investigative journalism standards leave much to be desired.

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Pretty silly?

Yeah.

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A 'slight shove' doesn't put one on the ground. Ya gotta really push, hard. Obama pushed a girl to the ground.

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