If there was any doubt about Romney's esteemed character...

You know, after the interminable GOP primary and the brutal general election, I didn't think anything Mitt Romney said could leave me slack jawed anymore, but he's out done himself in defeat.

In a conference call with fund-raisers and donors to his campaign, Mr. Romney said Wednesday afternoon that the president had followed the “old playbook” of using targeted initiatives to woo specific interest groups — “especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”

“In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said, contrasting Mr. Obama’s strategy to his own of “talking about big issues for the whole country: military strategy, foreign policy, a strong economy, creating jobs and so forth.”

Mr. Romney’s comments in the 20-minute conference call came after his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, told WISC-TV in Madison on Monday that their loss was a result of Mr. Obama’s strength in “urban areas,” an analysis that did not account for Mr. Obama’s victories in more rural states like Iowa and New Hampshire or the decrease in the number of votes for the president relative to 2008 in critical urban counties in Ohio.

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” Mr. Romney said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

Free contraceptives got Obama the lady vote. Yes, that must have been it (oddly, I had heard it was going to cost him the Catholic vote).  And, believe it or not, Romney had more to say.

Apparently, the gifts Romney proposed to give to plutocrats was not a good electoral strategy for him. 

Man, we dodged a bullet...again.

ZEGS!

House Republicans are about as popular as asbestos.

Romney has run a campaign of vague generalities regarding...well...everything, from his "eliminating loopholes" to his immigration policy.

So, well-played, sir.

In theory, this should be a net negative for the Romney ticket. To be successful, contemporary conservatives need to focus on generalities about “taxes” and “spending”; when you actually get to specifics, their plan of slashing federal spending on health care, Social Security, and other important programs to finance upper-class tax cuts is exceptionally unpopular. Ryan still cheats by not specifying cuts a lot, but his budget should have enough detail to hang the GOP. But whether the Obama campaign will do this effectively, or how effective counterattacks will be given that any attempt to point out the actual consequences of Ryan and Romney’s McKinleynomics will be scored as a million Pinocchios setting a million pants on fire is less clear.

The good news is that this sets up a real difference in the two campaigns' respective vision of America's economy and the future of the New Deal and Great Society.

Not to mention, we have seen how picking a VP who is more popular with the base than the #1 on the ticket works so well for the GOP.

Obama apologizes to Romney

Brilliant.

Portrait of a centrist

The Ryan/Romney juggernaut staggers forward, ensuring permanent unemployment for millions.

Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people are desperate for new skills to pull them back into the job market, but when they visit a job-training center, they are often turned away. As Motoko Rich reported in The Times on Monday, Seattle’s seven centers had money to train only 5 percent of the 120,000 people who came in last year seeking new skills, and the numbers are similar elsewhere.

The reason: drastic cuts to federal spending on training over the last six years, including $1 billion since the 2010 fiscal year. Even though training programs are already harder to get into than Ivy League universities, Republicans in the House want to put them even further out of reach.

Last month, the House passed a 2013 budget written by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin that would reduce spending in the category of Education, Training, Employment and Social Services by $16 billion from the previous year, or 22 percent, on top of all the cuts forced by Republicans over several years. The cut in that category is typical of a budget that savages precisely the kind of domestic spending, like job training and Pell grants, needed to help people get off social-safety-net programs, while slicing open the net itself, through big reductions in Medicaid and food stamps (all while generously lowering taxes for the rich).

Mr. Ryan lacked the courage to provide the details of how sharply his budget would affect popular programs like job training or state aid to education. That task, he says cynically, will be left to the appropriating committees in Congress. When a critic like President Obama tries to point out which programs will inevitably suffer when a broad category is sharply cut, Mr. Ryan’s allies, including Mitt Romney, rush in to claim that no such cut was specified in the budget. They want it both ways: to win support from those who don’t care about social programs, without ever having to detail the pain the cuts would cause. 

Rombot 2.0 reboots on the minimum wage

It shouldn't, but I continue to be amazed at Romney's sneering disregard for voters, especially Republican ones.

It didn't get much notice amid the buildup to Super Tuesday. But after conservative outcry over his support for raising the minimum wage, Mitt Romney quietly reversed his position this week.

"There's probably not a need to raise the minimum wage," the Republican front-runner told CNBC's Larry Kudlow on Monday.

As recently as January, Romney said he was in favor of a hike in the minimum wage. "My view has been to allow the minimum wage to rise with the CPI [Consumer Price Index] or with another index so that it adjusts automatically over time," he told a staffer for a labor-backed group that supports a raise. And he confirmed that stance last month, telling reporters: "I haven't changed my thoughts on that."

Romney took the same position as governor of Massachusetts, an office he held from 2003 to 2007, and as a candidate for president in 2008.

As Yahoo News reported last month, Romney's support for a minimum wage raise—something Democrats have been pushing for and Republicans have generally opposed—provoked a furor on the right. "All it does is give the base another reason to be unenthusiastic about him," conservative publishing magnate Steve Forbes, who made his own bids for the GOP nomination in 1996 and 2000, told us.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Club for Growth and several other major conservative players also slammed Romney's stance, arguing that raising the minimum wage makes small businesses less likely to hire workers. A 1993 study by the economists Alan Krueger—now President Barack Obama's top economic adviser—and David Card found no such effect.

None of Romney's rivals for the nomination support raising the minimum wage, and one of them, Rep. Ron Paul, has said the concept should be scrapped.

Romney's new stance may help him consolidate his position on the right, but could hurt him in November. According to Gallup, public support for raising the minimum wage has consistently exceeded 75 percent over the past two decades.

The mission Romney wants to accomplish

LBJ introduced The War on Poverty.

Romney wants to tweak that -- The War on the Poor.

Mitt connects with the common man, again

Mittens, speaking to an empty Ford Field in Detroit, explains that the poor -- whom he doesn't care about -- should be required to make the payments on a couple of Cadillacs.

Row after row of barren blue seats across the giant stadium made the crowd seem minuscule. Through the rapid-fire, reality-reshaping powers of the Web, a storyline for the day began to take hold that undercut and detracted from Mr. Romney’s words: big speech, tiny crowd.

Ordinarily, such imagery might be overwhelmed by the news of the day: a highly anticipated, substantive address packed with previously unknown details. Mr. Romney called for a 20 percent cut in income taxes; handing control of federal welfare programs to the states; and creating private sector competition for Medicare services.

But the Romney campaign had leaked most of the speech’s contents several days ago, leaving members of the news media with little to focus on — except, of course, the scene itself.

The distractions did not end there. After Mr. Romney finished his remarks, he took a handful of questions from the audience. The final question seemed harmless: Why was Mr. Romney the best candidate to challenge President Obama?

But Mr. Romney veered off course. After ticking off his credentials as a businessman and a Washington outsider, he detailed his fleet of personal vehicles, trying to connect his love of cars with his love of Detroit. “I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.”

Two Cadillac SRXs, to be precise. The cost of each: $35,000 to $50,000.

Once again, Twitter feeds and news blogs lighted up with Mr. Romney’s latest casual reference to his extraordinary wealth — remarks reminiscent of the playful $10,000 bet he tried to make with Rick Perry during a debate, and his remark about liking to fire those who provide services to him.

(A campaign aide displeased by the fuss later said that Mrs. Romney owns a 2007 and a 2010 model SRX, a luxury crossover vehicle, keeping one at the family’s home in Massachusetts and the other at their beach house in California.) 

Shorter Romney campaign aide:  If you have a house on both coasts, you need two cars, dumbasses!

But it gets better.

Mr. Romney’s aides were quick to dismiss the clinical dissection of the candidate’s words and the location of his speech on Friday. 

 Don't pay any attention to what he said or where he said it.

Obama, worst monster in American history

As America (well, a few hundred likely Republican voters and a handful of others) watched four wealthy white men debate the horrors of contraception, they heard Willard Mitt Romney fail history (again).

You could almost hear the smiles coming from Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. In the 21st century, four far-right white wealthy guys, all of whom think they should be president, spent 15 minutes in a nationally-televised debate talking about access to birth control.

The GOP candidates might as well have put a banner over their heads reading, "Independents, please don't consider voting for us."

But it was Mitt Romney's response to the question that amazed me. "I don't think we've seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we've seen under Barack Obama," the former governor said.

The picture is called "The Battle of Nauvoo," depicting attacks by the good citizens of that Illinois city on the Mormon population of the town.  This took place following the assassination of Joseph Smith, the LDS founder, in nearby Carthage, Missouri.  All done with the tacit approval of the governor of the state. The attacks ultimately led entire Mormon population to wagon train to the salt lake.

It's hard to know what Willard Mitt Romney is at this point.   He's not this guy -- too old to get out of Nauvoo in time.