Mitt Romney officially sewed up the Republican presidential nomination with his victory in Texas.

On a day when the attention should have been focused on him, however, it was deflected — by Romney’s own fault — to the flaky Donald Trump, who flirted with a campaign for the presidency himself before it became evident that few outside the billionaire’s sycophants took his candidacy seriously.

Trump has kept his name in the political headlines by attaching himself to Romney’s campaign and by perpetuating the completely discredited claim that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and thus is serving in office illegally.

Trump’s ignorance, though, is not the issue here. The issue is what Romney’s reluctance to disassociate himself from Trump says about the GOP candidate.

Romney, it is becoming clear, is cautious to a fault. He is so skittish about alienating any segment of the GOP base that he constantly straddles the fence not only on serious issues but on nonserious ones, such as this persistent nonsense about the president’s place of birth.

— The Greenwood Commonwealth, Mississippi, May 30