John McCain has succeeded in poaching some political talent from Mitt Romney's turf, hiring a Boston political operative with intimate knowledge of Romney and his shifting political positions over the years, the Associated Press reports. The operative, Rob Gray of Gray Media, will advise McCain on "New England strategy," the AP says.

The kicker is that Gray is mainly useful to McCain because he was a top political adviser to Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey, who ran a failed campaign last fall to succeed Romney as governor -- a failure that's partly attributable to the fact that Romney recently begain adopting more conservative positions than the ones he and Healey ran on back in 2002. So Gray has detailed knowledge of the vulnerabilities created by those shifts by Romney -- a body of knowledge that McCain evidently views as rather useful to him right now.