Exorcising Mitt (UPDATE)

Would you want to get inside of this guy’s head?

While Willard’s dodge of a question about whether he supported equal pay for women, his  “whole binders full of women” comment that has lit up the twitterverse and is providing endless fodder for bloggers and pundits everywhere, my favorite takeaway from the debate is not something that was said during the debate but about the preparation for the debate itself.

Politico reports:

Sen. John Kerry joked Wednesday that he’ll need an “exorcism” after the final debate next week to purge Mitt Romney after playing the GOP presidential nominee for weeks in debate prep with President Barack Obama.

“It’s been an interesting exercise,” Kerry said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “I’ve decided next Tuesday I’ve got to have an exorcism of Romney out of my being.”

Good luck with that.

Kerry might want to consult with Sissy Spacek, nominated for Best Actress for her lead in the movie “Carrie,” who reportedly got so into her character that it took her weeks to completely shed it.

UPDATE 10/17 12:35 pm : Ooops. Looks like Romney got caught in another lie.

HuffPo reports the following:

[Romney] “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ and they brought us whole binders full of women,” he said.

Romney’s account of that story is false, according to two women who led an effort in 2002 to recruit female candidates to high-level appointed positions in Massachusetts. MassGAP, a bipartisan coalition of women’s groups dedicated to increasing the number of women appointed to top government jobs, approached Romney and his Democratic challenger Shannon O’Brien before the 2002 gubernatorial election and pressured them to sign a pledge to appoint more women if elected.

“It was an initiative of women’s organizations, not to force [Romney’s] hand, but to make it be something he had to follow through on,” Carol Hardy-Fanta, former co-chair of MassGAP’s higher education subcommittee, told The Huffington Post the morning following the debate. “He didn’t go out looking for these binders.”

Liz Levin, who was the chairwoman of MassGAP at the time, told HuffPost that during the 2002 governor’s race, the group spent months identifying, vetting and collecting resumes of qualified women for the high-level appointments.

“They told us … that they were going to send [the binders] to us,” O’Brien recalled in a Wednesday interview with The Huffington Post. “Whoever won was going to get this.”