Kris Kobach has been informally advising Mitt Romney since 2008 — and in an interview just now, the Kansas secretary of state stressed that he remained an informal adviser on matters of immigration to Romney, despite a Politico report today that suggested otherwise.
He brushed off the incident as “a tempest in the teapot that’s being purposefully … fabricated by the Obama campaign,” a reference to the Obama campaign’s efforts to portray the report as an indication that Romney was turning to the center in order to re-position himself for the general election.
“Nothing’s changed,” Kobach says. “I just got off the phone with the senior officials in the Romney campaign and they confirmed nothing’s changed, I’m still an informal adviser in the sense that I regularly provide policy advice to the Romney team. The governor takes my advice, and does what he wants with it.”
“This is probably an interesting little example of the kind of the games that the Obama team will play,” he added, “that is, they’ll try to goad someone on the Romney team into saying something that semantically can be twisted into a change of position, and then they’ll accuse the candidate of changing position, when in fact nothing’s changed.”