Romney Flops Back Toward The Middle

A couple of months ago one of Willard Mitt Romney's chief advisors told us that once Willard had achieved the Republican nomination, he would shake his etch-a-sketch and move back toward the middle. In other words, he would abandon the right-wing views he had been espousing to appeal to the teabagger base of the party, and once again become the moderate that he had been when running for governor of Massachusetts. Last night he started down that road.

After touting a tax program that would give massive tax cuts to rich people (like himself) for the last few months, he told the debate audience last night that he would not cut taxes on the rich at all, but would instead cut taxes for the middle class. Of course he doesn't explain how he would do that, since he's advocating a 20% tax cut for everyone and saying he'll pay for that by eliminating unnamed deductions. The problem is, of course, that the middle class depends far more on deductions to keep their taxes down than do the rich. The rich would definitely benefit from a 20% tax cut, while the middle class would suffer because of the deductions eliminated. In other words, he lied -- but it was a lie calculated to make him look like he is once more a moderate.

Then, after running from his own health care plan (which is almost a carbon copy of Obamacare) for months now, he wheeled around last night and embraced it. Of course, he tried to say it was different than Obamacare (which it isn't), and when pressed for the differences, all he could say was he worked with Democrats to get the plan, while Obama didn't work with Republicans (leaving out the fact that Republicans had refused to work with the president, even though he reached out to them repeatedly). It turns out this was just another lie, since repealing Obamacare, as he said he would do, would be a repudiation of his own plan. But again, it was a lie calculated to make him look like a moderate.

And after months of saying the Dodd-Frank law must be repealed (the rather weak regulations on Wall Street), Willard now says that Wall Street must have regulations. He didn't say what regulations they must have, just that they must have some. That's another lie. There's no way he's going to repay Wall Street and the corporations for the many millions they have given to his campaign (and to his super-PACs) by imposing any kind of regulations on them. But as with the previous lies, it was calculated to make him look more like a moderate.

The question I have right now is -- what do the teabaggers think about this effort to abandon their right-wing views and once again become a moderate? They have never truly trusted him, and for months they tried to find someone else to nominate -- anyone else. They suspected he wasn't really agreeing with them, and would abandon them once he got the nomination. Now that is happening. Will they still care, or are they so racist that they will vote for him anyway -- just because he's not African-American?

I have said before, and I repeat it now. Willard has only one real belief -- that rich people like himself shouldn't have to pay taxes. He will say whatever else a crowd wants to hear to get their votes, demonstrating this many times by switching sides on every issue (except tax cuts) -- sometimes in the same week.