David Brooks Cooing Over Romney's Debate Performance

      David Brooks is in love again. Romney has been proven to be a moderate!

      "A sour fog settled over the Republican Party during the primary season. Several plausible candidates decided not to run for president, and the whole conversation ended up tainted by various political circus acts."

     "The GOP did its best to appear unattractive. It had trouble talking the language of compassion. It seemed to regard reasonable political compromise as an act of dishonor. It offered little for struggling Americans except that government would leave them alone."

     "The Obama campaign took advantage. President Barack Obama could have run against Mitt Romney by calling him a flip-flopper. Instead, the president tapped into the GOP gestalt and accused him of being a soulless ideologue or the tool of ideologues. Judging by how the president was prepared for Wednesday's debate, Mr. Obama's staff apparently believed that that charge was actually true."

     "But, on Wednesday night, Mr. Romney finally emerged from the fog. He broke with the stereotypes of his party and, at long last, began the process of offering a more authentic version of himself."

     "Far from being a lackey to the rich, Mr. Romney vowed that rich people will not see tax bills go down under a Romney administration. He attacked Mr. Obama for giving a "kiss to New York banks." Instead, he focused relentlessly on job creation for the middle class, which, he noted, has seen incomes fall by $4,300 under this president while gas prices have doubled and health care costs have surged."

    Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/david-brooks-moderate-mitt-returns-romney-finally-emerges-from-the-republican-primary-fog-656606/#ixzz28hR5hB6J

    Ouch! Reading David Brooks' banality is painful. There's so much wrong here. Where to start?

     First of all, there is no reason to choose between Romney being a flip-flopper or a tool of Right wing ideologues. In fact Romney is both. Because the agenda of the ideologues is so unpopular he has to be a slippery flip-flopper.

     For all that Romney was certainly not more authentic Wednesday night. However, he won the debate is wasn't through honesty. To the contrary it was through obfuscation and prevarication. He may have vowed that rich people will not see tax bills go down but he hasn't show us how he will manage this when he's proposing an across the board 20% tax cut.

    He claims he can make up the $5 trillion this will cost through a plan to close loopholes that he won't identify. In other words, like most of Romney's plan, this is a secret plan. What else is new? His attack on the President for giving "a kiss to New York banks" was directed at the President's championing of bank regulation. In fact Romney wants to give a kiss to banks, New York, or otherwise by gutting finacial regulation and killing the nascent Dodd-Frank. This might explain why all the big banks and hedge funds have been giving Romney a big, wet kiss.

    Brooks' picking up Romney's silly attempt to pin high gas prices on the President is just embarrassing. Brooks of course is not worried about all the dishonesty and lies in the debate. All that matters is the pundits have hailed Romney the "winner" though no one can really point to one memorable issue he raised that was in any way fact-based.

    One more point about the allegedly Moderate Mitt. In Brooks' world all you need to do is call a Republican the word moderate and he swoons. Romney himself that night made a very misleading case for his ability to work with Democrats. After all, he points out, he did it in his state.

    Yes, but that's a state where the Congress he faced was close to 90% Democratic. What about  Washington Circa 2013? If Romney happens to win, they you can presume he'll have a Senate and House to work with. In this context Romney's "moderate" status won't matter very much. Does Brooks want us to believe that Romney will stand out against his own party when they send him decidely non-moderate legislation?

     Bear in mind that his running mate is a creature of the House GOP, Paul Ryan. If the Ryan budget comes to his desk, will Romney veto it if it's not "moderate" enough?