One way to better understand where the Romney campaign's decisions come from is to learn more about its top media strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, who's the subject of a lengthy Huffington Post profile on Friday. The best part of the report, written by Jason Cherkis and Christina Wilkie, is their deep dive into Fehrnstrom's career as a reporter for The Boston Herald and his personality. Unsurprisingly (but still amusingly) The guy who GQ's Jason Zengerle dubbed "Romney's balls" in a May profile, and who The Atlantic Wire's Eslpeth Reeve put at the top of her list of "manly men in politics," some folks are remembering him as, well, a bit of a jerk. The profile opens with an anecdote about how Fehrnstrom gloated over a mean-spirited scoop that caught former Massachusetts Lieutenant Gov. Evelyn Murphy on vacation while the state foundered monetarily, a story also told by GQ's Zengerle. But the real fun part comes farther down in the piece, when Fehrnstrom is leaving the Herald to go into politics. Per Cherkis and Wilkie:

Fehrnstrom never looked back. He even stood up his own goodbye party. After realizing he wasn’t going to show, state politics reporter Jon Tapper said, “We just finished our beers and talked about what an asshole he was.”

“The whole personal relationship side of things was never important with Eric,” Tapper said.

Remember the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry's neighbor is a extorts him for a visit with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and then wants Larry to hire him as a lawyer, much to the approval of David's sidekick Jeff, who says, "pricks are good. You want a prick." This story makes Fehrnstrom's whole career seem a bit like that.

Read the whole thing at The Huffington Post.

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Adam Martin