Candidates on the campaign trail face a huge occupational hazard: Germs.
They shake hundreds of hands each day. They hold babies. They acquiesce to requests for hugs that sometimes lead to big wet kisses on the cheek from their older admirers. And they’re asked to sign all sorts of grimy objects: baseball gloves, menus, books, Christmas cards and sometimes literally the shirt on the voter’s back.
All that primary season glad-handing is enough to make any germ-phobic American shudder, and apparently it caught the attention of a young attendee at Mitt Romney’s Friday evening forum in Hilton Head, who told the candidate she was working on a science project on germs.
“I was just wondering,” she asked the former Massachusetts governor, “how many hands do you shake every day and how often do you wash them?”
The candidate, along with the crowd, burst into laughter, but he told her it was a “very important question.”
“You’ll be happy to hear that I do wash my hands regularly so that as I shake your hand today you won’t have to worry if the germs I got earlier today in Florida are going to be coming to South Carolina,” Romney told the student (who appears to be taking her assignment seriously –- since she posed the same query to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum on Thursday, according to a tweet by New York Times national political correspondent Jeff Zeleny).
For good measure, Romney added that he’s a regular user of Purell hand sanitizer “just to make sure I don’t pass things along to folks,” he said, “But you know, I appreciate that – that’s a good question.”
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