Mitt Romney Will Say Anything to Get Elected, but Can He Remember What He Stands For?

On Sunday, Mitt Romney deigned to grant an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. Although hardly the rough pointed questions that one may expect,(David Gregory is the host after all), there were some striking questions, responses and (GASP) actual follow-ups that begged the obvious question: Is Mitt Romney even clear on what Mitt Romney’s platform actually is?

When asked about balancing the budget, Romney stated that he would not give a bunch of tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires, but that he would bring the marginal tax rates down, then close loopholes for top earners.

Gregory asked the correct question, for a change: “Specifically, what loopholes would you close?”

Romney couldn’t answer it. He continued to vaguely talk about closing loopholes, but lowering rates, dancing away from specifics.

“People at the high end, high income taxpayers, are going to have fewer deductions and exemptions,” Romney said. “Those numbers are going to come down. Otherwise they’d get a tax break.” [1]

Isn’t that raising taxes? Something guaranteed to run afoul of Grover Norquist, de facto tax policy maker for the GOP and his legion of American Taliban in Congress?

Romney went on to say that he wouldn’t be raising taxes on the middle class, but lowering them as all of the tax rates would be lower. He didn’t discuss how he managed to balance a budget in this manner, only citing that studies from the GOP/TEA parties collective institutions of the over educated liberal elite at Harvard and Princeton, as well as the Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute, that this wouldn’t add to the deficit in any way, but that it would reduce it over time. It’s a trickle-down economics without the label, already repeatedly disproven by more reliable sources such as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and major economists [2]

How much time and money the government would lose and its effect on the well-being and prosperity of the middle class and poor are questions that it would take electing Romney and Ryan to find out.

Conservative estimates are already being tossed around by the media, one being $4 Trillion dollars in lost revenue over the next ten years. [3]

Perhaps my math isn’t as good as Governor Romney’s. That seems to be a deficit going up, not down.

When asked how soon he would balance the budget, Romney replied that he would do so by the end of his second term.

That’s right folks, he said second.

He went on to say that to do so now would have a “dramatic impact” on the economy. Which, even though Mr. Gregory missed it, is Mr. Romney’s tacit admission that President Obama’s current course of action with the economy is actually working. You’d jump all over a “broken” plan with this kind of stimulus if there was a real, not phony, financial crisis, right? We’ve had 36 months of straight job creation, and even though the economy is weak, it is growing slowly and the DOW is over 13,000.

Oops.

Beyond that, Mr. Romney is barely on course to be elected to a first term, let alone a second. His implication that Presidents need two terms to clean up a catastrophic mess, much like the one that George W. Bush and the Republican Congresses of his day put us in, is a tacit endorsement that President Obama deserves another four years.

It begs the question: If he is truly understanding the mess in which we now find ourselves, would he take similar steps to what President Obama has done to repair it?

The presumption that Mr. Romney will have willing partners in the House and Senate is arguable, since Neocons and the Libertarians who control the GOP in Congress have few common interests. To get any major legislation passed, he would need the complete cooperation of the Democrats, which is not likely to be forthcoming.

So Mr. Romney has a great likelihood that he will find himself a President on a very small island, with only a handful of surviving “RINO” (Republican in Name Only) neocon congressmen and hostile camps of Democrats and Tea Party Taliban on either side. In short, he stands a greater chance of being less effective at governing than President Obama.

Governor Romney also talked about Obamacare, not in the way one would expect though. Romney talked about the provisions that he’d like to keep, such as pre-existing conditions and allowing children to stay on their parents insurance into their 20’s. Of course he put that out there for the Sunday talk audience, then his campaign walked those remarks back eighteen hours later. By Sunday afternoon, the Romney campaign released a statement turning on the idea in its entirety, yet again changing his mind about policy…in the course of few hours. [4]

He’s certainly changing his mind faster these days, at least.

Here’s the thing about elections: They allow us to use our rights to vote for whomever we choose. You can take any information that you would like to make that decision.

With the misinformation and ever-changing positions coming out of the Romney campaign, I don’t know how anyone can trust him long enough to cast their vote for him on November 6^th.

We listen to the lies and flip-flops. Mr. Romney wants us to forget about the pesky details, and have faith that, in January 2013, he’ll get his act together.

Or…

We can vote for the guy who kept the economy from floundering into a Depression, kept private sector job growth positive for the last 3-1/2 years, kept America safe from terrorism, stood up for women’s reproductive rights and the LGBT community, cut taxes for working Americans, and has only asked that the elites in a country with the most disproportionate wealth distribution of any major capitalist economy pay a paltry 3% more income tax, just as they did in the 1990s. Oh, and someone who has displayed patience, grace, and true character all along the way in the face of the greatest partisan political opposition since the administration of Abraham Lincoln.

One thing is clear: Mr. Romney will say anything to be the President. What isn’t clear is: What does he REALLY believe when he’s not telling this or that group what he thinks that they want to hear, and then reverses himself every 18 hours or so?

Mitt wants you to trust him. Given his erratic daily flip-floppery, has he earned that trust, though?

About LPB

This is a "what's going on in the world" type of blog. Any and everything that interests me could make the cut! Politics, current events, fashion, television...we'll just have to see how I'm feeling that day.

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