Romney’s Economic Closet

By PAUL KRUGMAN

<...>

And therein lies the reason Mr. Romney acts the way he does, why he is running a campaign of almost pathological dishonesty.

For he is. Every one of the Romney campaign’s major themes, from the attacks on President Obama for going around the world apologizing for America (he didn’t), to the insistence that Romneycare and Obamacare are very different (they’re virtually identical), to the claim that Mr. Obama has lost millions of jobs (which is only true if you count the first few months of his administration, before any of his policies had taken effect), is either an outright falsehood or deeply deceptive. Why the nonstop mendacity?

As I see it, it comes down to the cynicism underlying the whole enterprise. Once you’ve decided to hide your beliefs and say whatever you think will get you the nomination, to pretend to agree with people you privately believe are fools, why worry at all about truth?

What this diagnosis implies, of course, is that the many people on the right who don’t trust Mr. Romney, who don’t believe that he’s truly committed to their political faith, are correct in their suspicions. He’s playing a role, and it’s anyone’s guess what lies beneath the mask.

- more -

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/opinion/krugman-romneys-economic-closet.html

Running On Empty

By Ed Kilgore

It’s not clear to me why Mitt Romney was so hell-bent on delivering his Detroit Economic Club speech today (officially unveiling the tax plan everybody’s been writing about all week) at a nearly-empty Ford Field (he even joked about it) but that’s what he did, after his poor advance team discarded several scenarios for making the site look no more empty than his rhetoric.

Maybe he thought it was a suitable venue for doing a big shout-out to the Detroit Lions, who recently completed their best season in a couple of decades. But even at their absolute nadir, the Lions were drawing a lot more than the 1200 souls who showed up to listen to Mitt’s pithy remarks. And from a superstitious point of view, Romney should probably be aware the resurgent Lions haven’t quite made it to the Superbowl just yet.

Sometimes the Romney Death Star looks terrifying to us mere mortals whose ambitions are clouded by inconveniences like day-jobs and scruples. But sometimes it looks more like a machine built around a self-regarding man who thinks his image is too big for anything smaller than a stadium Jumbotron.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_02/running_on_empty035627.php