Follow the R-money

There is only one issue on which Mitt R-money has a consistent position: lower taxes for himself.

But even on tax transparency - as with everything else - Mitt has taken multiple contradictory positions:

[Emmett] Hayes had filed his taxes separately from O'Brien – and Fehrnstrom, then Romney's deputy campaign manager, demanded that O'Brien come clean about her husband's financial ties to Enron.

Fehrnstrom made the demand even as Romney was refusing to release his own returns.

That drew accusations of hypocrisy from editorial boards, but Fehrnstrom defended the campaign's posture, saying that O'Brien was trying to hide important information from voters by declining to reveal her husband's returns, while Romney was simply acting on principle.

R-money? Principled?

Only the me principle.

Coakley takes a chance

Martha Coakley is a very careful politician. For years, it has been tough to get her to make definitive statements about most issues of the day (and that's why I support Mike Capuano - no such difficulty there).

So I find it odd that she has stuck her neck out to choose that public funding of abortion is more important than all of health care reform. She's not choosing not abortion rights. She's opting for funding or no public option, no forcing of insurance companies to do right, no attempt at universal coverage. The House bill is far from perfect, but it has a lot of value.

I really would have expected her to waffle on this, since it's definitely an issue that Democratic primary voters will vote on, and she's already the frontrunner - in perception, at least. Instead, she has put herself in a position with little wiggle room for later.

This reminds me a little of Shannon O'Brien's ill-fated campaign for governor in 2002. At the time, Mitt Romney supported abortion rights (such a short time ago!), and O'Brien apparently thought that should be her issue. She tried to open up some space between their positions by advocating the rational position that the age of consent for abortion should be the same as the age of consent for sex, and it backfired very badly on her. I think it cost her a very close election.

Now Coakley seems to be trying the same thing. I not only disagree with it. I think it's bad politics.

Spitting into your Mitt

I wasn't fast to sour on Mitt Romney. Not that I'd vote for him, of course, but he didn't seem as awful as the typical Republican. Many of my friends were more perceptive.

When he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, I could tell he was lying about his views of abortion. But it didn't seem so terrible when he won narrowly, in part by making an issue of Shannon O'Brien's proposal to align the age of consent to sex with the age of consent to abortion. The 2008 Presidential campaign came, and Romney made his infamously expedient conversion to hard right views in ardent favor of a blastocyst-to-birth welfare state (and police state, too). That proved my 2002 belief correct.

This is a man who will say anything to win an election. He's running on a marketing plan, not on his own convictions. (It's not that I believe he lacks convictions; I think he does have true convictions of his own, but I suspect that they're too wingnutty and extreme and downright weird to ever win.)

The problem for Romney is that even Republicans, who desperately wanted to believe him, could tell that he's as smarmily insincere as politicians come. And, man, that's saying a lot. Sarah Palin, for instance, is about as self-promoting as they come, but she still from time to time lets slip some really outlandish bullshit out of her core convictions, however inchoate they are.

So, when Mitt offers up his ass to be kissed by the habitual ass-kisser Larry King, he of course says that Obama is "learning on the fly." Yep, Romney pretends that he would of course know exactly what to do about an episode in the economy that has no analogy dating back seventy years to a time when the organization of the economy was much different, much more local, and moved much more slowly. Romney says this with the same smug arrogance of the "masters of the universe" on Wall Street for the simple reason that he's one of them. His recipe for fixing this would not be so different from Tim Geithner (minus points for Obama), although it would be much more pitched to allowing disastrous failures. Romney would wind us all up in penury.

In sum, Mitt Romney is:

• smarmy
• insincere
• smug
• arrogant
• the exact wrong doctor for the economy
• and won't countenance the destruction of blastocysts in research that might help his wife Ann, who suffers from multiple schlerosis - and he reached this epiphany for craven political reasons

The ipecac candidate! But of course - of course - he's running in 2012, his non-denial denial notwithstanding. Otherwise, he'd have better things to do than show up on CNN.

Romney's credibility

Mitt Romney was lying about his abortion views when he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002. He was always anti-choice, but he knew he couldn't win with that position in Massachusetts, so he said what he had to say to get elected. He told honorific stories of his mother's pro-choice leanings even though all the evidence indicated she had held no such views. A man who would lie about his mother is truly a man who would lie about anything.

Romney also knew that he could run and win honestly in Utah but that that would be a political dead end, and he had the Presidency in mind from the very beginning. Just what America needs - another dishonest scion of a failed Republican.

In 2002, Romney did provoke Shannon O'Brien into trying to find some way to make a distinction between their views, and she made consistency of the age of consent and the age of parental consent to abortion an issue. This only made her sound extreme, even though it was perfectly reasonable. The moral of the story is to attack his credibility instead of his position.

Of course, Romney can't admit his duplicity, even though it would help him if the ardent anti-abortionists could trust his current desire to overrule Roe v. Wade. But admitting the truth would cast him as an opportunist, which of course he absolutely is.

Mitt Romney believes he is entitled to the Presidency. He does not feel obligated to sell himself truthfully.