Romney deems Obama a liar ex post facto

I have long marveled at the verbal contortions Romney must go through to a) justify current GOP nonsense positions and b) align his own prior pronouncements and actions with current nonsense.  Often this Operation Twist further involves c) differentiating his past and even sometimes his present position from a functionally similar position of Obama's, with whom the dear departed centrist pragmatist Massachusetts Mitt has often been aligned.

Hence Romney must regularly wax paradoxical, continually compiling new verses to this lover's rune:

I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone,
I gave my love a story that had no end,
I gave my love a baby with no cryin'.

But Romney outdid himself this week when reversing the position taken by his aide Erich Fehrnstrom and his own long-held position that the individual mandate is a penalty, not a tax. Listen carefully:

“While I agreed with the dissent, that’s overtaken by the fact that the majority of the Court said it’s a tax and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There’s no way around that,” Romney said. “The American people know that President Obama has broken the pledge he made — said he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-income Americans.”

Not only does Romney here assert that his own reasoning is negated in some existential sense by the Court's 5-4 ruling, along with the reasoning of the four conservative justices with whom he agreed. He is claiming that Obama's long-held position, which matches his own, retroactively became a lie the moment Roberts read the crux of his decision from the bench.  An ex post facto lie.

What poli-sci can't quantify

When Eric Fehrnstrom came out with his indelible Etch-A-Sketch metaphor for the Romney campaign's intention to wipe the slate clean for the general election, I took issue with political scientist Brendan Nyhan's assertion that all such gaffes have "little electoral significance":

There are gaffes and gaffes, however.  The evidence that they don't matter is often gathered from polls taken shortly before and after the incident in question, showing little difference -- e.g., in this John Sides post cited by Nyhan.  Some campaign blowups sink deep, however, and some are gifts that keep giving for the opposition.  When making phone calls for Obama in the fall campaign in '08, I spoke to several people whose opinion of Obama had seemingly been shaped by the Jeremiah Wright affair or by his "cling to guns and religion" riff.  Perhaps their fears about him -- in some cases racist ones - -simply seized on those handy objects. But who's to say whether some such explosive objects-to-hand may not pack more charge than others? That anxieties about Obama's "black agenda," as one person characterized it to me, would not have been less intense if that particular fodder had not been furnished?  And when a potent negative perception works its way over time into people's overall perception of the candidate, is it detectable in polling?

It seems to me that Fehrnstrom has put a weapon with staying power in the hands of Romney's opponents, chiefly Obama.  Any time an antagonist wants to call attention either to a new tack-to-the-center policy shift or an old one, he or she can figuratively shake an Etch-A-Sketch

Well, the Obama campaign at least takes this view -- at the highest levels.  Obama's May 10 interview with Robin Roberts (famous for other reasons) included this exchange:

Proud owners of the post-truth campaign

Paul Krugman famously dubbed Romney's drive for the presidency "the post-truth campaign."  You would think the candidate and his organization would take umbrage at such a characterization.  But no, they've embraced it.

I can think of four occasions since October when Romney or his surrogates admitted more or less outright that Romney's words or deeds are either willfully misleading or purely for show.   Most recent first: