In a column for today's Christian Science Monitor, Mansoor Ijaz quotes Governor Romney as follows:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

We are regularly inundated with communications from the Romney, Giuliani, and McCain campaigns, but we haven't heard from any of them about Ijaz's column. If Ijaz's quote is accurate, Governor Romney has demonstrated a remarkably poor understanding of an issue he should have thought through long ago.

UPDATE: Captain Ed and Jim Geraghty offer comments, including a response from Governor Romney's camp. David Walser writes:

Team Romney indicates that they are skeptical of Mr. Ijaz’s account. They’re not saying that the quote is false, because they don’t have a record of the exact words in their conversation; their meeting occurred at a political fundraiser in Las Vegas. But they say that the quotes of Romney that appear in Ijaz’s article don’t represent the views of their man. Two additional points:

Ijaz quotes Romney's answer (verbatim we are to believe) but he doesn't share with us the wording of the question to which Romney was responding. What are the chances that knowing the question might make Romney's answer seem more reasonable? Perhaps Ijaz question was something like this: Given the increasing number of Muslims in the US, should a Muslim be part of your Cabinet? Romney's answer (if quoted correctly) could still be faulted for granting the premise in the question -- that positions in the Cabinet should be allotted based on demographics, but it comes off as much more reasonable.

Ijaz places this conversation at a Romney fund raiser. What was Ijaz doing there? These events are usually closed to the press. If Romney were unaware he was speaking with a journalist on the record, he might have been more careful with his wording. For example, he might have been less willing to grant an erroneous premise contained in a question put to him. Again, this is not to excuse Romney's answer (assuming it is accurately quoted and reflects his views); it just recognizes that some situations are less formal than others and that different standards should be applied. We properly judge word choice in a written article more severely than we do off the cuff remarks. Similarly, we should grant a candidate more leeway in responding to a question in an informal setting than we would at a press conference.

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