Mitt Romney is really doing a great job of embodying the current GOP. I don't know what the man actually thinks. I have always thought that if Romney ran as Governor Romney from Massachusetts, then Obama would have real problems. But Romney gave that up (or was forced to) by the GOP extremists and now sounds small and confused. His comments on the Libya attack on the American Ambassador, his pick of Paul Ryan, his disastrous comments made to the fundraiser luncheon in Boca Raton, his continuous flip flops all demonstrate a person who will conform to what he needs to do to gain support. That might work well in business, but not politics. People know that turning Medicare into a voucher program, but ONLY for those under 55 is not fair. People can smell they hypocrisy. This is the party that cut payroll taxes, then turns around and screams about how few people pay payroll taxes!!
In 2004, gay marriage was used to get people to come out and vote and probably helped elect George W. to another term. W. ran against an elitist, out of touch Democrat from Massachusetts named John Kerry. 8 years later, the GOP trots out Romney, an elitist, out of touch Republican from Massachusetts. And gay marriage is now supported by a majority of Americans.
As Paul Waldman observes:
As I've maintained for some time, for all intents and purposes there is no "real" Mitt Romney. His political beliefs are the equivalent of Schrodinger's cat. They exist in every state at once until you open the box to observe them. If the one opening the box is a Tea Partier, they instantly lock into place as a set of Tea Party beliefs; if it's a bunch of GOP plutocrats staring down, that's whose beliefs he'll mirror. Romney has spent the last five years in an intensive period of study, with his subject the contemporary American conservative mind in all its permutations. He's well aware that the misleading talking point about 47 percent of Americans not paying taxes gets repeated all the time on the right, in private and public. What he was telling the people in that room is what he tells any group of people he speaks to. His message was, in Christine O'Donnell's immortal words, "I'm you."
Of course, when Mitt Romney loses, the GOP will not learn that it's religious zealotry to broken ideology of supply side economics and hate is the problem here. No, it will blame Mitt and try again. How many times will it take for this failure to shake these folks awake? Is America going to be held hostage by this old guard until these folks die of old age and whose ideas are finally swept into the dustbin?
"Sarah Palin would be a great foreign policy advisor [to Mitt Romney]. To her, all policy is foreign." - Steven Colbert
