The fact that Romney likely cannot win Massachusetts — and probably won’t even try to — illustrates the degree to which his currying favor with conservative Republicans in GOP presidential primaries has alienated the moderate base that launched his political career.

If Romney defeats Obama while losing Massachusetts, he would be the first presidential candidate elected without carrying his home state since before the Civil War. James K. Polk lost Tennessee en route to the White House — 168 years ago.

In 2000, Democrat Al Gore, who had spent years in Washington as a senator and vice president, fell short of winning Tennessee in his losing White House bid. Other notable home-state losers include Democrats Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota in 1968 and Adlai Stevenson of Illinois in 1952 and 1956. Republicans need to go back to 1936 to find a nominee who didn’t carry his home state: Kansas Gov. Alf Landon.

Romney aides argue that it would be a waste of money to run TV ads and compete in a state Obama carried by 25 percentage points in 2008.

Some Massachusetts residents agree, feeling that their former governor used the state as a springboard for his national political ambitions. And some seem to resent him for it.

“He doesn’t know where he lives,” said Mike Egan, a retired independent sitting at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Belmont, near Romney’s home.

While Romney’s permanent address is the home he keeps in this upscale Boston suburb, he spends considerable time, including holidays and vacations, at his homes in California and New Hampshire.

Egan and others say Romney seemed to have his eye on the White House as soon as he arrived at the Massachusetts State House in 2003.

The following year, he made his first trip to Iowa, home of the leadoff presidential caucuses, to speak at the state GOP’s fall banquet some weeks before President George W. Bush’s re-election.

He would visit Iowa three times in 2005 and nine times in 2006. That year, Romney spent 212 days outside of Massachusetts. One trip included a visit to Iraq and Afghanistan to enhance his international credentials, just as his state grappled with a devastating flood.

“By the time he left, it became clear to everybody that he was committed to national politics,” said Massachusetts Republican Sheldon Binder, a retiree who supported Romney, as he sat near Egan.

Republicans had held the governorship for 12 straight years by the time Romney took office in 2003.

Voters were comfortable supporting candidates with right-of-center fiscal profiles. And Romney’s moderate profile, including support of abortion and gay rights, fit in with other Republicans.

But some in Massachusetts were turned off by what they saw as Romney’s effort to project a more conservative profile on hot-button issues, in part to prepare to court socially conservative activists in states such as Iowa that hold early nominating contests in election years.

Romney reversed his position on abortion while in office. And, after advocating full equality for gay and lesbian couples, he publicly condemned the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision in 2003 to allow gay marriage.

“He’s a moderate. He’s not a conservative Republican in the true sense of the word,” said Matt Walsh, a 36-year-old advertiser from Mansfield who sat with his mother at the doughnut shop. “That’s why he played well at first. He won the voters in the middle.”

Romney was elected governor by a slim margin — 50 percent to his Democratic opponent’s 45 percent — and his approval ratings, while never soaring, topped 50 percent in public opinion polls at times during his one term. But by the October before he left office in 2007, Romney’s approval had dipped to 34 percent in a Boston Globe poll.

With Massachusetts apparently out of reach, Romney aides are trying to claim his native Michigan as the campaign’s home turf. But while Obama can bank on winning his home state of Illinois, Michigan is no lock for Romney.

Romney, 65, was born in Detroit and grew up nearby in Bloomfield Hills, but hasn’t lived in Michigan since his teen years. Despite Michigan being viewed as competitive in recent campaigns, no Republican has carried the state since George H. W. Bush in 1988.

What’s more, Obama and other Democrats have criticized Romney for opposing the 2008 federal bailout of Detroit-based automakers Chrysler and General Motors. Romney favored allowing the companies to go through bankruptcy without taxpayer help.

Obama, meanwhile, frequently highlights his decision to extend the companies a lifeline and their return to profitability as one of the successes of his administration.

Still, Michigan is more within Romney’s reach than for any Republican in nearly a quarter century.

His family name, made by his father, George, once a governor and an automotive executive in Michigan, still resonates in the state. Romney also has influential contacts in the state, which he reminded voters about at every stop while campaigning for Michigan’s GOP primary in February, which he won.

Michigan also has trended Republican in recent state elections, including a 2010 GOP sweep of statewide offices. Detroit, the dominant force for Democrats, has seen its population shrink amid the auto industry’s troubles, while its suburbs and western and northern Michigan have kept their GOP complexion.

“The climate is much more ripe for a Republican victory in 2012,” said Jeff Timmer, a former Michigan Republican Party director. “When you add to that he does have home-state roots and an established presence, it adds an element to Michigan that no other candidate has brought to this state in a long time.”

So while Michigan may also be a stretch, it rates higher than Massachusetts on Romney’s priority list, according to former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu.

Of Romney’s chances in Massachusetts, Sununu said: “I wouldn’t rule it out completely — even though it’s No. 50 on the list.”

___

Beaumont reported from Iowa.

Don’t try this at home, folks. It takes a professional politician to pull it off with a straight face.

A sampling of the also-rans’ anti-Romney rhetoric when they were candidates and their obligatory niceness after endorsing Romney.

___

RICK SANTORUM

The former Pennsylvania senator still doesn’t have trouble curbing his enthusiasm for Romney. He waited a month after dropping out of the race to endorse Romney, then emailed his tepid endorsement in the dead of night. He finally got out the E-word in the 13th paragraph of his 16-paragraph statement.

THEN:

—”He is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.” Santorum later said he was referring to Romney’s standing on health care reform.

—”If Mitt Romney’s an economic heavyweight, we’re in trouble, because he was 47th out of 50 in job creation in the state of Massachusetts when he was governor. He may have had some success at making money for himself and his partners at Bain Capital, and I give him a lot of credit for doing so, but that’s a very different thing than going out and creating an atmosphere for people to create — that create jobs.”

NOW:

—”There are many significant areas in which we agree: the need for lower taxes, smaller government and a reduction in out-of-control spending. We certainly agree that abortion is wrong and marriage should be between one man and one woman. I am also comfortable with Gov. Romney on foreign policy matters, and we share the belief that we can never allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons. And while I had concerns about Gov. Romney making a case as a candidate about fighting against Obamacare, I have no doubt if elected he will work with a Republican Congress to repeal it and replace it.” — Endorsement emailed to Santorum supporters.

___

NEWT GINGRICH

Gingrich didn’t formally endorse Romney when he dropped out of the race but spoke well of him and later said that was close enough. The guy who promised not to run down his GOP opponents at the start of the race had some withering things to say about Romney during the heat of the campaign. Gingrich, a former House speaker, would rather you forget that now, though: His anti-Romney videos on YouTube, once public, are now private. The man who repeatedly branded Romney a “Massachusetts moderate” now calls him a “solid conservative.”

THEN:

—”Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when he is president.”

—Are you calling Mitt Romney a liar? “Yes.” Questioned about his previous comment.

—”Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?” To Romney during a debate.

—”Why would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama?”

—”We are not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about.”

—”I think that a bold Reagan conservative with a very strong economic plan is a lot more likely to succeed in that campaign than a relatively timid Massachusetts moderate who even The Wall Street Journal said had an economic plan so timid it resembled Obama.”

NOW:

—”I’m going to campaign for him, I favor him over Obama. I went through, like, seven different issues where I favor him. I’ll do everything I can to help elect Romney. … As far as I’m concerned, I’ve endorsed him.”

—”Compared to Barack Obama, Mitt Romney is a solid conservative. And I think you have to come down to, what’s the choice this November? And the choice is the most radical president in American history and a failed president at the economy and somebody who has a solid record on jobs and who, in fact, on basic principles, is conservative. And I think you can get into arguments about who’s how conservative, but compared to Obama, Mitt Romney is a solid conservative.”

___

MICHELE BACHMANN

Bachmann waited four months after dropping out before she endorsed Romney. The congresswoman from Minnesota campaigned with him in Virginia earlier this month but didn’t bring up health care in their joint appearance.

THEN:

—”He can’t beat Obama because his policy is the basis of Obamacare. The signature issue of Obama is Obamacare. You can’t have a candidate who has given the blueprint for Obamacare. It’s too identical. It’s not going to happen.”

—”He’s been very inconsistent on his positions. He’s been on both sides of the abortion issue, on both sides of the issue with same-sex marriage … he was for the TARP bill, the $700 billion bailout and the global warming initiatives.”

NOW:

—”I am endorsing Gov. Mitt Romney for president of the United States, a man who will preserve the American dream of prosperity and liberty.”

—”This is what victory looks like.” Campaigning with Romney in Portsmouth, Va., on the day she endorsed him.

—”He’s very smart. He has a very optimistic message. Women trust him because they see, this is a man who started a business from scratch, for heaven’s sake.”

—”One thing that Mitt Romney has demonstrated, he will repeal Obamacare. That’s a big compare and contrast between Barack Obama. We will never get rid of socialized medicine, which is Obamacare, under Barack Obama. Mitt Romney has committed himself to repealing Obamacare. … A lot of people know Mitt Romney’s positive agenda.”

___

RICK PERRY

If he couldn’t have the GOP nomination himself, Perry still wasn’t about to back Romney. As he dropped out of the race, the Texas governor endorsed Gingrich. He didn’t come around to endorsing Romney until Gingrich announced last month that he was planning to drop out.

THEN:

—”While you were the governor of Massachusetts in that period of time, you were 47th in the nation in job creation. … You failed as the governor of Massachusetts.”

—”If you are a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina to tell you he feels your pain. Because he caused it.”

—”I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he’d have enough of them to hand out.”

NOW:

—”Mitt Romney has earned the Republican presidential nomination through hard work, a strong organization and a disciplined message of restoring America after nearly four years of failed, job-killing policies from President Obama and his administration.”

___

JON HUNTSMAN

The former Utah governor endorsed Romney at the same time he dropped out of the race in January, but there was no joint appearance.

THEN:

—”You can’t be a perfectly lubricated weather vane on the important issues of the day.”

—”Gov. Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.”

—”When you combine a record of uncertainty — running first as a senator, as a liberal; governor as a moderate; then as a conservative for the presidency, people wonder where your core is.”

—”He’s been on three sides of every major issue of the day. And because of that it’s going to be very tough in the end to be able to make that trust argument to the American people.”

NOW:

—”It is now time for our party to unite around the candidate best equipped to defeat Barack Obama. Despite our differences and the space between us on some of the issues, I believe that candidate is Gov. Mitt Romney.”

—”I think he’s the best equipped by far to deal with the economic issues and challenges that confront us. … He’s grown a lot, he’s learned a lot. He’s probably better prepared to lead.”

___

RON PAUL

The scrappy Texas congressman was the last man standing among Romney’s GOP opponents, and he’s not ready to make nice yet. Paul announced this week that he won’t campaign anymore, but he’s still collecting delegates at state party conventions and could give Romney grief at the national nominating convention in Tampa, Fla., come August. Paul ran some scorching ads against Romney earlier this year but shied away from going after Romney in person.

THEN:

—Narrator in Ron Paul radio ad: “Mitt Romney can’t fight against Obamacare because he supported the same mandates and government takeovers as governor of Massachusetts. Romney can’t stand up against more bailouts because he supported them. He can’t lead the charge to shrink the government because he has grown it. Romney’s record is liberal and putting him up against Obama is a recipe for defeat.”

NOW:

—”Not soon.” Paul’s answer when he asked Tuesday when he’ll endorse Romney.

___

Associated Press writer Jack Gillum contributed to this report.

Whereas losing presidential candidates usually have their pick of well-paying sinecures, their consultants and flacks will need to preserve their reputations just well enough to get the next job. And so, especially near the end of campaigns, we get the anonymous leaks, recriminations and dramatic tales of late-night internal bickering in dim penthouse chambers that fuel Politico ebooks and “definitive” postmortems like “Game Change.” Political consultants are never heroes, but some, usually those with fresh book deals but lacking in fresh narratives, will attempt to portray them that way. As the two Politico e-books released during Republican primary season already indicate, this election cycle’s process of finger-pointing — which consultant is most responsible for making Rick Perry “look” incompetent, for example — is already well underway.

So let’s try to tell the stories of the various campaign apparatchiks before the post-November mythologizing pushes all other narratives into the black hole of deleted history. We’re going to bring you all the dirty tales of consultants, flacks and operatives connected to the Obama or Romney campaigns, showcasing all the kneecapping and fingerprinting and complaining that makes them the Great Minds that they are today. We’ll start with Romney’s personal slave, senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom.

– – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — – –

It’s a tough call, but the most depressing thing we’ve seen in this early general election season is esteemed Romney and Obama senior advisers Eric Fehrnstrom and David Axelrod’s penchant for trading juvenile, unfunny barbs on Twitter. This is how they spend their time, now, at the pinnacle of their political consulting careers. On April 14, for example, Fehrnstrom tweeted, “By not condemning Bill Maher, @davidaxelrod is signaling to supporters it’s OK to keep up the attacks on Ann Romney. Shame.” Axelrod replied, “@EricFehrn So until you have the guts to stand up to one of your own, you can take your studied outrage and stick it in…your Swiss bank!” This routine is beyond sad.

Much has been written about Axelrod both before and after his candidate won the 2008 election, the moment that crowned him as the reigning brilliant tactical genius of our time. But much less is known about his junior Twitter sparring partner, Eric Fehrnstrom, the challenger to his title.

Like Axelrod and countless others, Fehrnstrom learned the craft of professional trivial assholery in his previous career as a political journalist. He covered the police beat and state politics at the conservative Boston Herald for a decade. Former Herald editor Kevin Convey, sharing his memories of then-Romney communications director Eric Fehrnstrom in a 2008 Boston Phoenix profile, described his former colleague thusly: “My father used to talk about ‘pig-headed Swedes.’ Eric was a pig-headed Swede in the best sense of the term.” Which is exactly what the Herald, which has long considered it its divine duty to destroy Massachusetts Democrats’ careers and lives, wanted.

As Fehrnstrom himself wrote in Boston Magazine years later, his finest journalistic moment involved snapping a photo of Democratic lady on vacation in Florida. It’s scoops like these that show you precisely how thin the line between ideological tabloid writer and partisan campaign flack can be:

In December 1989, when the commonwealth was in the grip of a bitter cold snap and a fiscal crisis, the lieutenant governor, Evelyn Murphy, was on vacation in Florida. Since she was the candidate for governor, it could be argued that she belonged on freezing Beacon Hill, wrestling the state’s finances into shape. … So we lined her up for a kill shot. I jumped on a southbound plane with a photographer, and we staked out Murphy on Sanibel Island, on Florida’s Gulf Coast. We found her soon enough, jogging along a road in shorts and a T-shirt. The next day, we splashed her picture across page one, her middle-aged thighs flouncing across more than 300,000 newspapers. It was a terribly unflattering photograph, an image that became one of those iconic campaign symbols, like when Mike Dukakis rode in that tank with a helmet strapped to his head, looking for all the Flying Squirrel, only more dour.

Ah, those halcyon days, when men were men and Democrats were Michael Dukakis and Evelyn Murphy, sitting ducks who’d soon find themselves ruined at the snap of an “unflattering” photo. But that chapter ended when Fehrnstrom accepted a buyout from the Herald’s new owner, who according to him planned to “‘de-emphasize’ political stories, in 1994. He showed signs of remorse for his journalistic dirty work in that same 1999 essay lambasting reporters:

They write the same stories again and again, quoting the same pollsters and pundits, often migrating into Sunday-morning punditry themselves. After a while, they run on automatic. They even stop doing their own research, instead relying on political operatives who package stories for them, complete with photo ops and spin or, worse, blind quotes and low tips.

I was guilty of that, too. Hey, I was the guy who caught middle-aged, heavy-thighed Evelyn Murphy jogging down a Florida road in the middle of her winter vacation—exactly the kind of gotcha story that makes me wince when I see it now.

So Fehrnstrom, having made a name for himself by hyping trivial stories about liberal politicians’ personal lives, decided to change careers. Henceforth, he would protect conservative politicians from journalists who wanted to hype trivial stories about their personal lives. He got his first job in politics as an aide to Massachusetts state treasurer and 1998 Republican gubernatorial candidate Joe Malone. It was there that he began honing the skills that have endeared him to Romney.

Ambitious Massachusetts GOP politicians frequently deal with a unique problem in that party’s politics that, thanks to Fehrnstrom’s current boss, the whole country is now familiar with: Whether to be pro-choice or pro-life, and how to flip back and forth between those positions depending on the circumstances of an election cycle. From the June 22, 1994 Boston Globe:

State Treasurer Joseph D. Malone, long a champion of the state’s antiabortion movement, announced publicly last night that he has changed from an opponent to a supporter of abortion rights.

Malone, a rising Republican star in a state where opposition to abortion rights is considered a political liability, now supports both a woman’s right to an abortion and public funding of abortions, according to his spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom.

“A woman’s right to an abortion is the law of the land, and Joe supports the law of the land,” said Fehrnstrom. “Joe believes this should no longer be a political issue.”

Fehrnstrom’s eloquently fake explanation for Malone’s “conversion” also eerily brings to mind President Obama’s eloquently fake explanation for his own recent “conversion” to supporting same-sex marriage: “There has been a gradual evolution in Joe’s thinking on the subject.” A decent-enough line is a decent-enough line, no matter the party.

Alas, Malone’s gubernatorial bid was unsuccessful, and Fehrnstrom took his slick liar skills to their natural home in the private sector, the advertising industry, where he wrote press releases about the delicious new “spicy” menu at Popeye’s. His ability to lie on behalf of his employer must have caught Romney’s eye: In 2002, the candidate offered him a job on his gubernatorial campaign. Fehrnstrom’s been with Romney in some capacity ever since.

By all accounts, Fehrnstrom’s most important role on Team Romney has been to prevent the hilariously awkward candidate from ever talking to anyone, because that automatically leads to problems. “He wasn’t so much Romney’s press secretary as his bodyguard,” an “old friend” told GQ in a recent profile of Fehrnstrom, whose author added, “Once Romney was elected, he became even less accessible, with Fehrnstrom literally setting up velvet ropes around the governor’s office to keep reporters at bay.” It wasn’t just the reporters. Shortly after Romney took control, Fehrnstrom went on New England Cable News and picked a fight — an actual fight, with the shoving and the tussling and whatnot — with a local mayor who’d been hollering about Romney for some time. It’s confrontations like these that earned Fehrnstrom his reputation as, in GQ’s words, “Romney’s balls.” Fehrnstrom will wave you away if you offered him this … compliment. But privately, he, like all other consultants, enjoys the reputation of the tough-guy enforcer, or testicle-having bulldog monster, or whatever the poison pens run with on any given day.

So that’s been Fehrnstrom’s last decade: Containing Romney’s natural clueless clumsiness as much as possible and, when breached, trying his best to spin such behavior into something resembling goofy charm. When Romney directly contradicts his past positions on abortion, climate change, the auto bailout,, it’s Fehrnstrom’s job to come up with the impossible exculpatory line and deliver it to the press with a straight face. When Romney gives in to any of his grating tone-deaf rich-people pleasures, like flying on a private jet owned by Pfizer en route to a Republican Governors Association meeting, Fehrnstrom comes out and says, this is no big deal, why do you all think this is a big deal? When a reporter magically finds himself face-to-face with Romney and gets the opportunity to call him out on his lies, Fehrnstrom cuts it off and berates the reporter, “Act professionally. Act professionally! Don’t be argumentative with the candidate.” (Although it’s best that to not get caught doing this on camera.)

In his rare non-Romney free time, Fehrnstrom — who started his own consulting firm after Romney’s 2008 loss — serves as chief strategist to Sen. Scott Brown’s reelection campaign. This, better than anything else, shows you the “convictions” from which these strident consultants folks select clients: His job with one client is to convince the electorate that Scott Brown is just communist enough to deserve reelection in Massachusetts; his other is to prove that Mitt Romney is a “severe conservative” who’s prepared to destroy the world, if that’s what it takes. His one job is to demand six years worth of tax returns from Brown’s Senate challenger Elizabeth Warren; his other is to refuse to release more than two years’ worth of Mitt Romney’s.(Fehrnstrom’s other serious duties for Brown include writing secret fake Twitter accounts of Brown’s possible challengers, penning missives like “I promise to devote all my time in office to making gay videos. Shame on Scott Brown for focusing on jobs!’’ until he gets outed.)

Romney appreciates few things more than Fehrnstrom’s grimy, bellicose loyalty, and that’s probably the only reason he’s still around after making that infamous Etch-a-Sketch gaffe on national television a few weeks ago. But Romney’s rewarded him several times throughout his career. In 2005, according to a Boston Phoenix profile written a few years later, Fehrnstrom took over the Romney spokesperson job after the previous occupant, operative Julie Teer, had “lost a behind-the-scenes battle with Fehrnstrom.” (Like most washed-up Republican operatives, Teer is now a vice president at the Susan G. Komen Foundation.) And then there was this lovely pension-snagging post that Romney bestowed upon his good friend, at least for a couple of days until it became the scandal that it obviously would become. From the same Phoenix profile:

A controversy toward the close of Romney’s gubernatorial term made much the same point. In November 2006, the Globe reported that Romney had appointed Fehrnstrom to the Brookline Housing Authority. The posting itself wasn’t lucrative (it paid only $5000 annually), but it would have made Fehrnstrom eligible for a state pension when he reached retirement age. And given his salary history — at the time, Fehrnstrom reportedly was making $160,000 — that pension would have been a whopper. (In Massachusetts, pensions are set by the recipients’ three highest earning years.)

Fehrnstrom has spent ten years taking bullets for Mitt Romney, and in a few months time, he’ll either be remembered in political nerd history as the most brilliant tactical strategist of our time or the incompetent moron who didn’t know what he was doing and singlehandedly ruined Mitt Romney’s shot at the presidency. In the meantime, don’t expect to hear much crowing from Fehrnstrom directly. That would be poor consulting work on behalf of a client. Only expect to hear it, and plenty of it, indirectly, following the insiders’ unique moral code.

While researching this piece, for example, I kept coming across the same line in several pieces about Fehrnstrom: that he had come up with the devastating debate line that put Newt Gingrich out of contention in January’s Florida primary but refused to take credit in the media. Yet if he was refusing to take credit in the media, then why did I keep reading about how this was his idea?

It’s funny how they work.

A look at some of Romney’s assertions and how they compare with the facts:

___

ROMNEY: “America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.”

THE FACTS. Hardly. Presidents from George Washington through George W. Bush ran the national debt up to $10.62 trillion, the amount it was on the day Obama took office. Today, it is $15.67 trillion, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Public Debt. So it has gone up by $5.05 trillion under Obama. That’s roughly half of the amount amassed by all the other presidents combined.

In short, the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.

___

ROMNEY: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno. We will stop borrowing unfathomable sums of money we can’t even imagine, from foreign countries we’ll never even visit. I will bring us together to put out the fire.”

THE FACTS: Romney’s tax and spending plans don’t support his vow to dampen the debt fire. He proposes to cut taxes and expand the armed forces, putting yet more stress on the budget, and his promise to slash domestic spending isn’t backed by the big specifics. Romney’s tax plan would cut the top income tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent and other rates by 20 percent each. He says he’d broaden the tax base and eliminate many deductions in the process, but details are missing.

A study by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget concluded earlier this year that Romney’s plans would not make a dent in deficits, and could worsen them considerably. That study was done before Romney upped his tax cuts, inviting even deeper debt.

That’s not to say he can’t at some point lay out the spending cuts necessary to achieve his aims. But he would have to slash domestic programs by more than 20 percent — far more than the 5 percent in immediate cuts he has proposed. It is nearly unthinkable that Congress would approve the evisceration of basic federal functions such as food inspection, air traffic control, the Border Patrol, FBI, grants to local governments, health research, housing and heating aid for the poor, food aid for pregnant women, national parks and much more.

Nowhere in Tuesday’s speech was there a new idea of how Romney would accomplish the promised deficit reduction. He spoke generally of reforming Social Security and Medicare, eliminating duplicative government programs, and transferring some functions to the states or the private sector, adding that he would “streamline everything that’s left.”

The closest he has come to laying out a specific spending plan has been in his endorsement of the budget blueprint passed this year by House Republicans, which also fails to produce his promised deficit reductions.

___

ROMNEY: “The people of Iowa and America have watched President Obama for nearly four years, much of that time with Congress controlled by his own party. And rather than put out the spending fire, he has fed the fire. He has spent more and borrowed more. … When you add up his policies, this president has increased the national debt by $5 trillion.”

THE FACTS: Much of the increase in the debt is due to lower tax revenues from depressed corporate and individual incomes and high joblessness in the worst recession since the Great Depression. The recession officially began in December 2007, when George W. Bush was president and the national debt stood at just over $9 trillion. Financial bailouts, stimulus programs and auto rescue spending that started under Bush and continued under Obama contributed to the run-up of the debt.

But so did the Bush-era tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. With bipartisan support, Congress has extended the tax cuts until the end of this year, and Romney’s proposals for big cuts of his own would risk another squeeze on revenue.

To be sure, Obama as a presidential candidate in 2008 was just as eager as Romney is now to pin blame for mounting debt on a president from the other party.

Ignoring economic circumstances and the role of both parties in Congress, Obama accused President George W. Bush in that campaign of driving up debt by $4 trillion “by his lonesome” and taking out “a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children.”

Huh? Of course Obama cut taxes for the middle class in the 2009 Recovery Act, which Republicans consistently lie about, and Clinton controversially raised taxes on high earners (Romney would lower them) to cut the deficit in 1993. Meanwhile, Obama has left President Clinton’s welfare reform alone, despite rising rates of poverty and unemployment in the recession.

On Tuesday Romney took his attack up a notch, suggesting that “a personal beef” between the two men accounts for Obama allegedly rejecting Clinton’s centrism.

According to Romney, Clinton understood that “Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem. President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe it was a personal beef with the Clintons … but really it runs much deeper.”

There he is again, mean ol’ Mitt, trying to hype reports of personal tension between the last two Democratic presidents. It’s silly. Nobody denies there was trouble on the 2008 campaign trail during the Democratic primary, when the former president smarted at Obama camp charges that his overenthusiastic support for his wife’s candidacy, and diminishing of Obama’s, smacked of racism. And today, nobody suggests that the two guys are sneaking off to basketball games together or planning their next joint family trips. But whatever personal strain may persist, they put their problems behind them a long time ago.

Clinton stumped enthusiastically for Obama in 2008, and on behalf of the president and beleaguered Democrats in the 2010 midterms. Who can forget the current president calling on the past president to help him sell the idea of a compromise on the Bush tax cuts (to liberals, by the way) in December 2010 – and then walking away and leaving Clinton by himself at the lectern happily holding forth with the White House press corps (as Obama reportedly went off and did some Christmas shopping)? Currently Clinton is, of course, working hard to help Obama beat Romney. He recently attacked the presumptive Republican nominee for backing failed Bush policies “on steroids.”

As to the notion that Clinton was a centrist and Obama is a liberal: I think they’re both politicians with liberal hearts and centrist political instincts, working to make life better for the non-wealthy in an age when Republicans have become strident, extremist servants of the super-rich. President Clinton raised taxes on the rich. He signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, belatedly letting parents take time off after the birth of a child or when needed by a sick family member.  He let Newt Gingrich’s GOP shut down the government rather than agree to Medicare cuts; on that point, he might be more traditionally liberal than Obama, who entertained the idea of Medicare cuts while trying to get a “grand bargain” on the deficit last summer. (Since then, though, Clinton himself has come out in support of Simpson-Bowles, which would trim Medicare.)

Clinton vastly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one main reason why low-income people don’t pay any federal withholding taxes – a scandal (according to all the GOP presidential contenders) that Romney’s tax plan would remedy by imposing taxes on low-wage earners. The EITC is the absolute best proof that it’s Romney who’s moved away from the appealing mainstream ideas of his party’s past, not Obama. The low-wage tax credit Clinton and Obama expanded was originally a Republican notion (inspired by Milton Friedman) to make poorly paying jobs an alternative to welfare. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford, it was expanded by George H.W. Bush, and also supported by George W. Bush.

It’s true that Clinton tried to pioneer a “Third Way” attempt at Democratic centrism, balancing the budget and ending “welfare as we know it.” He thought if he met increasingly radical Republicans halfway, the country might make progress. He thought wrong. Instead Romney’s party attacked the man Romney now purports to admire; attacked him viciously, from Day One, culminating in a nihilistic effort at impeachment for sexual indiscretions that are common in Washington, D.C.

What Romney is really trying to do now, of course, is cause trouble with the segment of the electorate that admired Hillary Clinton but took a while to warm up to Barack Obama in 2008, particularly the white working class, as well as white female Democrats and independents. I don’t see it working. I’m on record saying repeatedly that dismissing Clinton’s support with working-class whites as merely racism was mistaken and divisive when Democrats did it four years ago. Working-class voters had valid reasons to doubt the charismatic newcomer whose economic platform was marginally less progressive than Clinton’s, and who talked riskily – and naively, as it turned out – of a post-partisan rapprochement with Republicans.

But that doesn’t make those voters easy targets for Romney. His record as Bain Capital job destroyer combined with his enduring prep-school entitlement should make him less simpatico than Obama to those voters. Romney lacks Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” empathy for working-class folks; he comes across as the guy who’s more likely to cause them pain.

Oh, and Romney, by the way, wasn’t always such a Clinton admirer. In his book “Turnaround,” he tells the story of visiting the White House in 1999, while Clinton was president (h/t Andrew Kaczynski):

When we got through the Secret Service checkpoint for clearance at the West Wing, the agent handed each of us a badge to wear around our necks. Mine had a big, red A. I turned to Cindy and, in front of the agents, said, “Why do I have to wear this?” Thinking I was confused, she tried to explain that all visitors to the White House had to wear a badge. “I know that,” I responded, “I’m asking why I have to wear the red A around my neck. I’m not the one that cheated on my wife. He should be wearing the scarlet A- not me.” I grumbled all the way up the drive and into the West Wing lobby. The look on Cindy’s face was priceless.

What a jokester! What a hypocrite.