Earlier today I spoke with a veteran political consultant who’s been closely watching the public discussion over who’s behind the anti-Romney calls, the trail that leads to Western Wats and trails off, the speculation that maybe Romney’s people were behind it, etc.

This consultant, whose firm has worked with Western Wats, says TargetPoint has a lot of company among political consulting firms who have past ties to WW. “Unless you’re doing all of your polling in-house, you’ve used either Western Wats or ProMark. They always have the capacity to do additional calls when you need it.”

This consultant speculated that if he were in charge of Western Wats, he might be calling the firm’s top clients and asking them which is more important – that the firm’s name be no longer associated with the actions of this client, or for the firm to honor non-disclosure agreements under any circumstances.

Beyond that, he says the Team-Romney-did-this-to-themselves doesn’t pass the logic test.

“Come on! Why would Romney’s people poll on questions like the issue of how African-Americans were treated by the Mormon Church?” he asks rhetorically. “How do you think people are going to react? Do you think the Romney folks don’t have a response on that attack ready to go? Why on earth would they poll people to find out how they respond to an attack on the issue of deferments during Vietnam?”

This consultant worried that with this poll, the door is opening to some very dark places for politics. This “opens the door to push polling on other religious questions – do you support a Catholic candidate who believes in a ritual that claims to drink blood?” (This consultant didn’t mention it, but I could imagine other avenues: “Would you still support Senator Lieberman despite his membership in a sect that practices ritual cutting of the genitals of baby boys?” “Would you support a candidate who believed that once the entire world was flooded, and that two of every animal survived on a big ship?”)

This consultant said he couldn’t rule out some right-leaning 527 being involved in this, but noted the tone of the questions seemed odd for use in a GOP primary: “I could see a Democrat using the information on in the general election – using the Mormon church treatment of African-Americans to spur turnout among that group. But that’s not terribly useful in the Republican primary. Same thing with the question on his sons not serving in the military – there’s a “chickenhawk” vibe to some of the questions that I think is very popular with Democrats, but I don’t think it goes over well with Republicans.”