The Herald Gives Romney and Sandy the Same Nickname

The Herald‘s post-Sandy front page named the storm “The Beast of the East,” a wordplay that seemed to disappoint at least one Facebook commenter. We weren’t disappointed so much as amused because “Beast of the East” was also The Herald‘s nickname for Mitt Romney, though not on the cover, when he clinched the Republican nomination for president in April. The website PatsPapers.com captured a screen shot of the headline in print at the time:

And a Lexis Nexis search confirms for us that this is the headline that ran alongside Hillary Chabot’s article (though it got a different headline on the web.)

In light of The Herald‘s glowing Romney endorsement last week, we can’t imagine the editors meant anything disparaging in assigning Romney the same nickname as a destructive hurricane. In fact, we’ve found at least two other instances where they used the phrase as a headline (mostly in their sports coverage) so we’re going to chalk this up to habit.