Here's the thing that freaks me out about Romney: you just can't read that guy. When he was called out by Rick Perry in the South Carolina debate, he had to go on the record as saying regulation was strangling this country. Sure, there is plenty of regulation that is onerous and can be taken off the books, but any sane economist will tell you that it was a lack of regulation in spheres of the economy which did not previously exist (or, at the least, have been drastically changed by global economic markets) that tanked economies worldwide like the U.S. and Greece. He did all of this with a perfect Romney mask that didn't show a single tick of insincerity; it nearly dropped my jaw. I've made a habit of going over a man's bullshit face, and he just had none of it, like one of those incredibly rare men who could pass a lie detector test from a seasoned vet making up a story on the fly.
There are only two reasonable possibilities, one far more likely than the other: either 1) Romney is an idiot who stumbles to the vast riches he seemingly methodically and brilliantly acquired over his career, or 2) He's bending over backwards intellectually for a sweet piece of Republican electoral action that none of the usual tricks will do it for and doing it flawlessly. I don't think he's an incompetent economist at all, I think that he's somehow learned to take the sincerity out of his truthful statements to make them indiscernible from his lies. He has been hiding his true self so far beneath his robotic avatar that everything he says sounds exactly the same, the only bits of humanity that occasionally bubble up that I've seen have been when he's been confronted by a Dreamer pushing the Dream Act.
I'm conflicted like a man torn apart at my own realization: Romney seems a decent guy playing a dozen political games, and has retreated within the turtle-esque shell of his robotic exterior, which only breaks down when he's confronted with something he knows is drastically wrong with something that hits home. For him, it's a policy which he knows will break up families. He's brought his own brood with him everywhere, every last one of them looking like they stepped out of a Land's End catalogue. I think that the man has imagined what it would have been like to be separated from one of his own pups when he held his nose to talk about how he'd veto the Dream Act to a Republican crowd. Considering his own families complicated immigration story, it's not entirely unthinkable that, with just a few minor details changed to his own story, ICE could have been putting his kids in foster care. Something like that sticks in a man's imagination, alongside other profound, painful ironies.
I wish I could rant and rave about how the man was evil, and just not decent, but he reads more like a man that would eat human feces fresh from the human with that same Joker-esque grin that he suffers through everything with. If you saw him smile for crowds while hugging strangers in New Hampshire, clue in to the South Carolina debate where his smile crossed swords with Santorum's mildly creepier smile during a follow-up or see him when he's being described in a quote read by the debate moderator as "A perfectly lubricated weathervane on the important issues," you see that same exact shit-eating grin he's wearing a good 35% of the time, rain or shine, truth or lie.