Romney's Seinfeld Campaign

Why does Mitt Romney want to be President? In his heart of hearts, what does he want to accomplish with 4-8 years in the Oval Office? On issue after issue, he has held views across the spectrum, as previously discussed here and here and here.

In a recent interview, Romney said the following:

“One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” Romney recalled. “So I think it’s important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies. So for instance, I anticipate that housing vouchers will be turned over to the states rather than be administered at the federal level, and so at this point I think of the programs to be eliminated or to be returned to the states, and we’ll see what consolidation opportunities exist as a result of those program eliminations. So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.”

So he's going to eliminate/reorganize huge swaths of the Federal government, but he's going to tell us nothing about which ones he will close, how he'll replace them, or why.

Awesome.

He is exploiting the ignorance of the actual facts among voters I'd discussed in my first post in 2011. If people are ignorant of how government spends money, it is easy to say "government is too big" and insist on cuts. But if people are told what those cuts will mean, which is what Romney says above that he'll refuse to do, they might not be so supportive. So Romney appears to be comfortable with allowing voters to cast their vote out of ignorance. This is not a positive development for our system.

Romney's campaign is about nothing. Like most people (including me), Romney appears to believe that a generic, bland Republican would have a great chance to win this year, and he's trying to be as non-descript as he possibly can, taking both sides of issues, being evasive, and now, flat out refusing to describe his positions on issues and plans for what to do once he is elected.