Staff struggles to prevent wind from blowing down prop as Romney unveils plan abandoning wind power

The New York Times's Ashley Parker takes note of Mitt Romney's newest prop:

On Thursday, Mr. Romney used an oversize bar graph to help unveil his new energy plan here. 'This is not some pie-in-the-sky thing,' Mr. Romney said, before turning to a graph that, despite its large size, was all but impossible for those in the audience to read.

Yet he gamely soldiered on. 'I have a chart that's still, despite the wind, still holding up up here,' he said.

As you can see in the video above, Romney continued talking about the wind. "These guys," he said, pointing to aides, "have held it up with about every piece of weight you can think of."

But while Romney's audience chuckled at the thought of a big time presidential candidate's staff needing to deal with something as mundane as preventing a chart from blowing over in the wind, nobody seemed to realize the irony of Mitt Romney struggling to overcome the power of wind while simultaneously unveiling an energy policy that expands federal support for oil and coal production but explicitly abandons renewables like wind power.

So was this a message from God? I don't know'maybe you should ask Pat Robertson. But this much is certain: if Romney and his aides had spent as much time thinking about how to take advantage of wind as they did trying to prevent it from knocking down his chart, they'd have a much better plan and we'd all be a lot better off.