My article: The Flip Flopping Say Anything to Win Romney is BACK! - 1st Debate Recap

The Flip Flopping Say Anything to Win Romney is BACK! - 1st Debate Recap

Mitt Romney had a big advantage going into this debate. He knew he was going to pull the dirty (and pretty strange) trick of denying the economic and tax plan he had been touting for the past 18 months.

It’s pretty hard for a candidate to compare their concrete plan to a fantasy series of goals thrown out by their opponent. That is what happened at Wednesday night’s debate. Romney denied the details of his own plan and said he would create a gazillion jobs, cut the deficit, spend a ton more money on defense, not cut spending on education or any entitlements, and cut taxes more. He gave no details about how he would do any of that and watching his spin-meisters try to explain that away as not a big deal after the debate was pretty amusing.

It doesn’t take a mathematician to conclude that you cannot cut taxes, cut the deficit, keep all other spending constant and increase spending by trillions of dollars on defense. It sounds really good and if anyone could really do that they would deserve to be elected to just about anything, but it would require a new math wherein a bigger number subtracted from a smaller number would not equal less than zero.

A fantasy series of totally unrealistic goals with no plan to reach them was the order of the night for Romney. On everything from the economy and taxes to healthcare to education to anything else Jim Lehrer asked about, Mitt Romney indicated he would achieve all of these spectacular levels of performance with no details of how he intended to do any of them.

With that kind of tactic, there’s no wonder the first reaction from lots of folks is that Romney won. Fantasies and dreams can easily beat reality. Anyone can walk into a debate and claim they can do all sorts of things if they don’t have to back it up.

The last time we had a Republican claim they could do all of these things and not create a deficit, we had George W. Bush accusing Al Gore of using ‘fuzzy math’. The problem is, Gore was right and ‘W’ created massive deficits. The difference is, unlike Obama, Bush inherited a strong economy with a surplus budget.

The key question for me is, at what point will the American people say, OK Mitt, this all sounds good, but how exactly do you plan to do it? Part of that question will be, now that Romney has suddenly repudiated his own economic and tax plan, what, exactly is his plan now?

We all should have known things like this were coming. In two separate Presidential election years, Romney was roundly criticized by his Republican rivals for flip flopping and making things up. In 2004 John McCain was famously asked in a debate to react to Romney’s plan on the economy and he responded “Which one”. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, here we go again.