Magic Beans & Fairy Tales

In the midst of your normally busy life, we hope you had a chance to see Mitt Romney address the NAACP on Wednesday in Houston.

Not surprisingly, there was was some disrespectful booing of Mr. Romney at the event, when he claimed he would repeal the Affordable Care Act if elected. Overall, Romney’s speech to the national convention of the NAACP was judged a surprising success in some corners, even if it was more bland and detail-free than usual - and that’s pretty impressive, even for Mitt Romney. That said, any success he may have reaped from his speech was likely spoiled by Romney's vague insult late Wednesday night about the NAACP crowd, when Romney said, "If they want more stuff from the government tell them to go vote for the other guy."

The fact is, Romney has been attempting to sell Americans vague promises and fuzzy details for almost his entire campaign, without giving us any real details. We looked in our daily notes for the last six months and could only find three instances where we or any other reliable media source hadn’t asked for some further specifics from Mr. Romney on… well, anything.

Romney may as well be selling magic beans, for all the specifics he’s been willing to give to the public so far - which, we still firmly believe, is a feature of his campaign, not a bug.

Even Republican Party mainstays are letting it be known that they’re now getting worried about the lack of details coming from the former Massachusetts governor. On topics ranging from Mitt's history with Bain Capitol, to his personal tax filings, Mr. Romney has continued to sidestep, evade, obfuscate, and generally try to not offend anyone with his positions.

That's a problem, when you consider the folks who might legitimately vote for him range from moderate, sane Republicans to extremist, GOP nutjobs. Point blank, you can’t keep both of these groups happy at all times, let alone the other fifty-to-sixty percent of the country.

Sadly, Mr. Romney’s über-vanilla non-committal positions fit perfectly with the odd insanity of the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The House on Wednesday, for the thirty-third time, voted to attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act - and for the thirty-third time, their efforts were both unsuccessful and completely symbolic.

In fact, since January of 2011, the Republicans in Congress have wasted 89 hours of taxpayers' time, attempting to remove the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. At a cost of $2 million dollars a day, every day that the House of Representatives has wasted on this is an amazingly wrong-headed action for a group of people who claim so strongly that they are fiscally responsible.

One might even think the Republicans in the House were crying wolf, politically, on an effort they have no real chance of winning - especially after the decision of the Supreme Court two weeks ago today.

All this blatant denial appears to have made the political right breathless and powerless to respond to the death of one their favorite traditional talking points, that Americans are paying too much in taxes.

In fact, as the report released this week from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office details, the average Federal tax rate paid by Americans is at the lowest rate in thirty years.

When you add up all the facts, with the House Republican craziness, and Mitt Romney’s constant attempt to sell political magic beans to the least informed citizens, our American political landscape is starting to look like some kind of twisted fairy tale.

In truth, this is just what you get when one party is relatively direct about their attempts to move forward, while the other party is in severe disarray and denial about their attempts to take America backward.

We recommend hanging on to your magic carpet for the remainder of the political season. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.