Says the candidate is not conservative
By Michael Levenson, Globe Staff | January 22, 2007
It was 4 a.m. Brian Camenker , 53, a computer programmer, sat at his kitchen table in Newton, hunched over his Toshiba laptop. Strewn around him were papers detailing former governor Mitt Romney’s alleged ties to gay youth conferences, gay judges, and abortion rights activists.
The documents, mostly printouts of news stories, represented weeks of work by Camenker and a few volunteers who had searched the Internet for material to disprove Romney’s assertions that he is a conservative. Now, the results glowed on the screen in front of him, compiled into a 10,000-word dossier, “The Mitt Romney Deception.”
Camenker e-mailed the report to six conservative activists and hopped a plane for Florida to see his mother for Thanksgiving. The activists forwarded the report to more activists. Within weeks, the report had reached thousands of conservative activists nationwide, sparked arguments on blogs, and been picked up by The Washington Times, National Review Online, and Fox News.Delighted, Camenker is preparing to release a second report this week, ” The Mitt Romney Deception Volume II, ” which he said links Romney to policies supporting adoption by gay couples.
The burst of attention has catapulted Camenker, a political agitator who has long protested gay rights in Massachusetts, into unlikely prominence in the nascent Republican presidential race. It has also underscored the startling power of the Internet to upset established political campaigns.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/01/22/activist_rains_on_romneys_parade/?page=full