Tactics

The Obama campaign has released a booklet detailing plans for a second term, including:

• Building the economy from the middle class out
• Reviving American manufacturing
• Increasing reliance on domestic energy sources
• Growing small businesses
• Improving education
• Middle class tax cuts and a balanced approach to reducing the deficit
• Implementing the health care reforms in the Affordable Care Act
• Protecting retirement security

Romney is currently appearing on a TV commercial endorsing Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock who said during a Senate debate Tuesday:

... [L]ife is that gift from God ... even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.

According to Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.com and Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium, President Obama has and has maintained a small lead in battleground states that translates into an electoral college win. Right-leaning RealClearPolitics shows the electoral college map closer, but only because it puts states like Pennsylvania in the toss-up column, where their own data shows Obama up by about 5%. So, as Jonathan Chait points out in New York Magazine when Romney says he's winning, it's a bluff.

In the words of Paul Krugman,

What Romney did in the debate ... was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Romney campaign hired firms run by Arizona Republican operative Nathan Sproul, to "register voters" in seven swing states. Sproul has previously been associated with allegations of fraudulent practices and dirty tricks, including impersonating the liberal group America Votes, collecting signatures to put third-party candidate Ralph Nader on the ballot, firing employees who brought in Democratic voter registrations, and discarding Democratic voter registration forms in Oregon and Nevada. In 2004 senators Patrick Leahy and Ted Kennedy called for a justice department investigation of Sproul's organizations. In 2006 George Bush invited Sproul and his wife to the White House Christmas party.

At the traditional time to release bad news, late in the day Friday, the Romney campaign released his 2011 tax returns. While apparently largely un-newsworthy, the returns were consistent with Romney's assertion that he regularly pays "at least 13% in taxes." In order to achieve that tax rate, however, Romney did not credit the full amount of charitable contributions he made. His campaign posted a statement from a trustee of Romney's finances:

The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor's statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.

Observers were quick to note that, by paying more taxes than legally required, Romney disqualified himself from being President, based on his own statement to ABC News in July:

I don't pay more than are legally due and frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don't think I'd be qualified to become president.

The NY Times Editorial board highlights Romney's and Republican dishonesty in not acknowledging that "Republicans charted a course of denial and obstruction from the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated, determined to deny him a second term by denying him any achievement, no matter the cost to the economy or American security — even if it meant holding the nation’s credit rating hostage to a narrow partisan agenda."

From the birther "joke" that was not, to debunked claims regarding the Obama administration's regulation of welfare programs, to continuing efforts at disenfranchising non-white voters, the Romney campaign has finally implicitly owned up to the real message of the campaign: "Vote for the white guy."

The GOP might as well stand for "gathering of prevaricators." From the Romney campaign to John Boehner's boozy media appearances, Republican mantras reiterate memes that may be popular and focus-group tested, but bear little resemblance to the truth. Or as The American Prospect's Jamelle Bouie put it "The former Massachusetts governor has no use for honesty in his campaign."