Is the Republican insanity about teleprompters finally going away?

Mitt Romney finally opted for a teleprompter in his New Hampshire Primary victory speech. Until Barack Obama won the presidency, there would have been nothing remotely noteworthy about that. Politicians and speakers of all kinds, regardless of their political affiliation, used teleprompters to give public speeches. But when Obama won against a white Republican, his use of the teleprompter suddenly became a huge issue to hear Republicans tell it.. The implication, of course, was that one of “those people” couldn’t possibly deliver a cogent speech without reading words someone else had written. And so the Republican crowd all had to eschew the teleprompter. At first, Romney solved the challenge of speaking for 15 minutes or more without a script by winging it. After a series of gaffes, and with a schedule far too full to allow memorizing a long speech every day, Romney opted for reciting the lyrics of America the Beautiful and calling that a speech. Romney had been coming under increasing media ribbing for his America the Beautiful ploy, and for not even being able to get those lyrics right.

I’m certainly not suggesting Romney is dimwitted. But the “teleprompter’s are evil” trope certainly does seem dimwitted, and has a way of making dimwits of those who try to preserve the lie. Have the Republicans finally given in to reality on this, or was Mitt’s victory speech in New Hampshire an outlier, and will they go back to winging it in future speeches? Of course, there’s always the hypocrisy alternative, using a teleprompter to excoriate Obama for using a teleprompter, as Marco Rubio did at the last CPAC convention. Which will it be, wing it, double deal it (teleprompters make him stupid but me bright), or use common sense and go back to tepeprompters for speeches just as speakers have been doing from Dwight Eisenhower forward?