Did Mitt Romney Go Brownface in Attempt to Woo Latino Voters?

AP / Univision / YouTube

The blog Democratic Underground seems to have called it first: The Republican candidate appears to have gotten darker in only a day's time. Fine, you say, he has property on the beach right here in Southern California. It happens.

Yeah, but this particular coincidence coincided with ...

... a "candidate forum" talk with Univision, aimed at Latino voters.

Some bloggers have pointed out that he wasn't so melanin-enriched just a day before yesterday's forum in Miami. Here's a photo of him during a campaign stop Monday in Southern California. You be the judge.

AP

Meanwhile, if you don't think Romney is quite dumb enough to go brownface for so-called brown voters, consider the other gaffes of the week, including his famous remark that nearly half the country is comprised of moochers who are meaningless to his campaign and the assertion that he would win outright if he was Latino by blood.

It's an interesting point, seeing that his father was born in Mexico, which would make papa ... Mexican.

You see, despite our occasional brownness, Latinos do not comprise a race and can come in an array of tanning-bed hues. Latin America has people with African and European heritage and everything in between. (Mexican actress Selma Hayek is of Lebanese descent; baseball legend Ted Williams, seemingly "white," was half-Mexican).

Romney, of course, knows that. It's in his family history.

To be fair, old rich gringos like to get tans. And the candidate was in Miami. You can get thong-tan lines just thinking about Miami.

Not all Latinos are aghast at Romney's sudden dash to the dark side, by the way. The website Pocho.com has come up with several possible reasons for the epidermal enrichment, including:

Fell face-first into Snooki.

So there. Give the guy a break.

[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]