When Mitt told a birther joke, as I reacted to on it MSNBC:

“Andrea, I’d like to answer your question but Twitter is exploding and I need to tend to that. The left and the right are going crazy over this. Look, I think Mitt Romney was making a joke. We’ve seen, particularly when he’s in Michigan, when he jokes about the heights of the trees. Now the left is going to say I’m making a huge excuse for him. I don’t know why he did it. It was ill advised, I’ll say that. And it is going to cause — we’ve already seen a statement from the Obama campaign, fast and furious, a reaction statement from the other side. You’re going to see tons of comment on this. I think this will dominate the day and into the weekend. Governor Romney, I think, will say he was just joking but people on the left aren’t going to believe it. And it was a mistake, whether it was accidental or on purpose, it was an unfortunate mistake because anything that injects the birther talk into the top of the Republican ticket is going to be seized on forever as something that is divisive and is a mistake. And, like I said, I think he was trying to be funny. I think it was not the right thing to say because it’s going to distract the campaign from serious issues for a long time and may distract from his convention.”

…..

“Well, there’s two things about this that are true which makes what Governor Romney said, for whatever reason, unfortunate. One is, there are all these other issues. Governor Romney has used other language, and his surrogates have, talking about the President needs to be more American, things along those lines. There’s the welfare ad, which there’s no doubt the Democrats think is a racial dog-whistle. So it’s part of a package of things that is going to intensify the Democrats claims that Governor Romney and his allies are engaged in a dog-whistle campaign across the board to try to paint the President in terms that they’re unwilling to confront directly. The other thing that’s unfortunate about it, as we all know, is there are tens of millions of Americans who don’t think the President was born in the United States. So anything that responsible people do to talk about that, someone who’s about to become the official Republican nominee, is going to inflame the dialogue in a way that the White House doesn’t like, and, frankly, Governor Romney shouldn’t like. And I think it’d be wise for them and good for the country if, rather than Kevin Madden’s initial statement, which, on the face of it, is fine, if they went a little further than that and tried to diffuse this. Now, there’ll be danger on the right if they do but I think it’s the right thing to do.”