Steve Benen notices the latest module pushed-live for the RomneyBot system.

Here’s Romney last week:

“I stand by my positions. I’m proud of them.”

And here’s Romney this week:

“In the private sector,” he said, “if you don’t change your view when the facts change, well you’ll get fired for being stubborn and stupid. Winston Churchill said, ‘When the facts change I change too, Madam. What do you do?’”

So the RomneyBot is going to address the flip-flopping charge. By flip-flopping.

That should work.

Rick Perry had a pretty tough night; the worst moment of which was his attempt to paint Romney as a flip-flopper which meandered and faltered, eventually making Perry look tired, confused, and old. It was pretty grim. But I’m not sure it was more than a tactical victory for Romney, because Bachman keeps shrinking and Perry wasn’t structurally harmed. So the essential dynamic of the race remains.

(For the record, Romney had three–I counted!–moments where he genuinely seemed like a real human being and would have fooled even the most sophisticated Voight-Kampf test. Also, he had one truly great line: “I want everybody to be rich.” Pitch perfect.)

But here’s the problem with Romney: Perry landed one solid blow on him, the line about Romney removing a line on healthcare from the hardcover to the paperback edition. (How’s that for detailed oppo?) Romney’s response was to claim that this simply wasn’t true, implying that Perry was either confused or a liar.

Yet in the spin room immediately after the debate, a Romney aid quickly fessed up that actually, it was Romney who was wrong. Perry was right. The line he quoted had been deleted from one edition to the other. The problem for Romney is that for a guy who has such a command of everything else at the debate, it’s hard to believe that he was just confused on this point. It seems much more likely that he was bald-facedly lying.

Which wouldn’t, in itself, be a problem. All politicians lie. (Wouldn’t you like to see some evidentiary proof of Rick Santorum ever having stood at the Texas-Mexico border?) Except that part of the whole rap against Romney is that he’s been lying about everything since the day he first decided to seek elective office back in 1994. This latest little debate fib just feeds into the underlying problems with his trustworthiness as a candidate. So far as I can tell, nearly every Romney supporter in the conservative establishment makes their peace with the idea of being on Team Romney by thinking to themselves, “Well, he’s on our side now, so at least he’ll stay bought.” Unlike all those other times when he flipped.

And maybe he will. Maybe this time will be different.

Caveat: I feel compelled, again, to reiterate that I don’t have anything against Romney personally. In fact, I think one of the great mysteries about him is why his political persona seems so crazily divorced from his real character. Here’s a guy who has been married forever, seems to have a great family; and seems to engender nothing by admiration in those he encounters in life. (I know a bunch of people who’ve worked for him or around him; to a person, they all like him.) But he has this weird political persona where he acts like a snake when he runs for office. He’s the mirror-opposite of the typical politician. It’s a conundrum.

PS: Between the audience cheering over the death penalty a couple debates ago, and then cheering the idea of letting the hypothetical young guy with the deadly disease who chose not to buy insurance die (was that the same debate? I forget), and then last night booing the out-and-proud gay soldier, it’s enough to make you think Republican voters are kind of unserious and mean-spirited. Or at least make you really, really uncomfortable.

This is great: Mitt Romney telling USA Today–without being prompted, it seems–that he hopes Sarah Palin will get in. “She would make the race that much more exciting,” he said.

Oh yes. Goodness knows Mitt Romney craves excitement! He’s a lot like that rock-band, guitar-playing Jon Huntsman in that way. And he certainly appreciates having a subtle political mind like Sarah Palin’s as part of the national conversation. As he’s been telling everyone who will listen, the problem in Washington is that you’ve got all these career politicians. And at least Sarah Palin isn’t a career politician. In fact, she was willing to sacrifice her political career to avoid becoming a career politician. If Rick Perry wanted to be qualified to govern the United States of America, he would have resigned as governor years ago. It’s just a fact. Science.

This is vintage Romney–bald-faced political positioning done with utterly transparent insincerity. You can see the processors whirring as the logic board does the calculations.

Perry commands support from “conservatives” and “Tea Party.”

“Conservatives” and “Tea Party” have pushed RomneyBot 4000 to second place in polls.

Chances of victory for RomneyBot 4000 while in second place: .28746322017. 

Must add new candidate to split “conservative” and “Tea Party” support.

Palin 1.0 commanded intense support from “conservatives” and “Tea Party.”

Will engage developers to push Palin 2.0 module into campaign model.

Perry support will halve.

RomneyBot 4000 becomes frontrunner again.

Victory assured.

He’s like a particularly humorless Dalek, with Just For Men hair. (The fly-away look he’s been rocking must have focus-grouped really well.)

If you want to know why Romney keeps losing elections, it’s because of stuff like this. Voters can smell it.

Last night was something new in the recent history of presidential debates, I think. I’ve never before seen a debate where the entire field dog-piled on the leader like that. Not in 2008 (on either side), nor 2004 against Dean, nor 2000 against W, or 1996 against Dole or 1992 against Clinton. I don’t know that the big pile-on Perry show means anything; I just don’t think we’ve seen something like it before, where the field doesn’t feel even the slightest need to be fake-pleasant to the leader.

Romney did pretty well, by his standards. But the performance fed into his structural liability as a candidate: Voters don’t quite know what to make of him when he’s sunny and positive. When he goes negative, he’s even more unappealing, because even his attacks are transparently manufactured.

Perry did okay, considering that he had to stand there and take it on the chin for two hours and that the debates are going to be the weakest of his campaign modes. That is, he did okay with one big exception.

I don’t quite get Michelle Bachmann’s strategy of trying to get to the right of Perry by painting him as being somehow inauthentic. Voters might buy that she’s more monolithically conservative than he is, but does she really think she can sell the idea that Perry is a fake–which is what her attacks last night seemed designed to do. I don’t think that dog hunts and, worse, it positions her as a Jacobin who refuses to acknowledge anyone else as a “true” conservative. In the long run, I don’t think that’s where she wants to go.

All of that said, she goaded Perry into one huge mistake, his bizarre, off-putting response that he was “offended” by the insinuation that he could be bought for a mere $5,000 because–hey, didn’t you know?–he raised $30 million.

There’s no way to look at this response that isn’t damning. And her rejoinder about being offended on the part of all the poor, innocent little girls (whose parents couldn’t understand an opt-out) was classic. Memo to RomneyBot 4000: That’s how you go negative.

What Perry should have said was something like this:

“I’ve said I made a mistake. And I’m not afraid to admit it. That’s part of being a leader. Now, I’m glad to know that Michelle has never made any mistakes–and good for her. But maybe if she’d ever been in a position of responsibility where she had to make executive decisions and hard choices, she wouldn’t be so lucky.”

It highlights her weaknesses (that she’s just a backbencher) and it diminishes her, instead of elevating her. Also, it keeps him on the mea culpa line for the HPV issue–which is where he should be, instead of trying to link it up to anti-abortion language.

This isn’t a mortal wound or anything. But it’s a sign of what Perry looks like when things go sideways for him. And its the first moment since he announced where his political instincts have actually been wrong.

Tonight Huntsman managed to be the least likable guy on a stage that included Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul. No small feat.

The only thing people dislike more than a smug smart-ass is a smug smart-ass worth $16-$71 million.

The insult-comic gimmick may go over great with Vogue correspondents, but with Republican voters it’s probably not enough to pull Pawlenty numbers.

P.S.: What would have been more bizarrely stilted, his Kurt Cobain name-check, a Korn Kidz shout-out? It’s such a weird reference, not (just) because it was totally ill-suited, but because Nirvana isn’t culturally relevant, but isn’t old enough to be classic, either. He might as well have tossed out Cracker or Harvey Danger or Soundgarden.

Great news for Mitt Romney in the new CNN poll. Sure, he’s down 12 points to Perry, but that’s a big improvement from the last CNN poll, which had him down 13!

But wait, it gets even better. In the last CNN survey, Romney only polled at 14 points. Now he’s up to 18. Where did those points come from? Michelle Bachman, mostly. And now that Tim Pawlenty has joined Team Romney, things will really start to accelerate for the governor as the conservative establishment coalesces behind him. Once Pawlenty’s 2 points get factored in, Perry’s lead should get cut to +10. And from there, Katie bar the door.

Watching the various comments tick in on the big Romney post, I’m struck by one thing: The Romney boosters seem to be of two camps–people who believe Romney is a real-deal conservative and people who believe that Romney is the only sane person in a Republican party dominated by crazy, real-deal conservatives. Essentially, Romney-supporting commenters represent the two divergent views of David Frum  and Hugh Hewitt concerning Romney.

I wonder if the presence of the other side under the Romney banner gives either one pause, since Frum and Hewitt see each other as representing everything wrong with the GOP/conservatism. After all, they can’t both be right about Romney, can they? Either he is a Frum Republican or a Hewitt Republican.

I suspect the Romney-Perry showdown will get increasingly unfriendly for all sorts of reasons, but one of them, I suspect, is that Perry–like most of the self-made politicians Romney has bumped elbows with–probably disdains Romney’s view that people without independent wealth have no business running for elective office. I’ve always marveled at how this line from Sridhar Pappu’s excellent 2005 profile of Romney hasn’t come back to haunt him:

As governor of Massachusetts he draws no salary at all. A lesson he says his father taught him is that one shouldn’t get involved in public life until it is a question of service rather than employment.

Maybe there’s wisdom in that maxim, though it does, at least on its face, seem to run counter to the American democratic experience. I’d like to hear him unpack it a bit.

Ross Douthat seems in danger of jumping on the Romney meat-wagon. He writes that despite Rick Perry’s position, Romney should not panic because “Romney doesn’t have to worry about any of the rival candidates making a play for his core supporters.”

We’re going to hear this argument a lot in the coming months from Romney partisans as they try to argue that something they would like to happen is, in fact, likely to happen. It’s worth taking this pundit fallacy apart now because it gets to the nub of why I’ve been insisting for four years that Romney is a non-starter as a political commodity—it’s precisely because he has no core supporters. Which is why he is not very good at winning elections.

Let’s revisit Romney’s campaigns:

1994: MA Senate Republican primary: Romney 82%, John Lakian 18%

1994: MA Senate general election: Ted Kennedy 58%, Romney 41%

2002: MA Gubernatorial Republican primary: Romney runs unopposed

2002: MA Gubernatorial general election: Romney 50%, Shannon O’Brien 45%

2006: MA Gubernatorial primary: trailing in polls for the general election to Deval Patrick—a guy who’d never run for anything before—Romney declines to seek reelection. I’ll count this as a loss; you might be more charitable.

2007: Presidential primaries: I won’t go state-by-state, but here’s the breakdown: Romney won only three states where the vote was a straight-up primary. Each of these wins was in a place where he had enormous legacy advantages: Michigan, where his father had been governor; Massachusetts, where he had been governor; and Utah, which is overwhelmingly Mormon. (He also won 8 caucus states, though the organizing rules there are much less indicative of electoral strength.)

On other side of the ledger, Romney lost primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, California, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland. (He also lost a bunch of caucus states, but we won’t count those against him since we’re discounting his caucus wins.)

Which means that in the 2008 cycle he went 3-16.

Combine that with the rest of his runs and you get a 17-year career record of 5-18. I don’t think you could find any other figure in politics who has run this far below the Mendoza line and still managed to get taken seriously as a presidential candidate. In fact, the only reason Romney gets taken seriously is his money. Strip away the $500M treasure room and the willingness to blow large chunks of his kids’ inheritance, and he’s Ron Paul without the ideological moorings and grassroots support.

But I’d argue that his electoral prospects are even worse than they look from his won-loss record. Here’s why:

(1) Romney made his political career out of his “close” 17-point loss to Ted Kennedy. But keep in mind that to only lose by 17, he spent $7M of his own money. But more importantly, this was the 1994 midterm election—so he got blown out during the biggest Republican wave in half a century.

(2) The high-point of his electoral career was the 2002 MA governor’s race, where he took 49.77%. Even in the biggest win of his life, he couldn’t capture more than 50% of the vote.

(3) It’s funny that Romney’s line of attack on Perry seems to be that Perry is a “career politician” because he’s been in elective office since 1984. Well, Mitt Romney would have been a career politician too, if only voters would have let him. He’s been running since 1994. His real gripe about Perry is actually, “Hey, that guy wins all the time! No fair!”

(4) Each of Romney’s previous electoral “successes” came with him occupying a different political space:

Romney 1.0 (MA senate) was Different Kind of Republican^TM.

Romney 2.0 (MA governor) was a competent technocrat, ready to fix Massachusetts.

Romney 3.0 (the 2008 presidential cycle) was a rock-ribbed conservative you couldn’t get to the right of.

Romney 4.0 is a sane, moderate, establishment Republican. (Romney 4.1 seems to have installed an Emotion Engine mod which allows him to show anger. Who knows what updates the engineers will push out if Romney falls into third place.)

Because of all these opposing political personas, I suspect that the Venn diagram of Romney voters over the years would probably show four distinct, small circles. And very little overlap.

Douthat says that “The greatest danger to Romney’s candidacy — the thing that could destroy him long before the voting even started — has always been that a more appealing establishment candidate would enter the race.” But that’s not right at all. The greatest danger to Romney’s candidacy is that he has no constituency because he’s not very good at campaigning and, as the electoral results of the last 17 years have shown, voters don’t like him very much. The danger to the Romney candidacy is the candidate.

At the end of the day, the only committed Romney voters out there are his co-religionists (see the 2007 Utah primary where he took 89% of the vote) and people who have written books about him.

On this last score, I’d remind readers of what Hugh Hewitt wrote on September 13, 2007:

“The third quarter fundraising is coming to an end, and so has Fred Thompson’s honeymoon, leaving one of three people as George Bush’s successor–Senator Clinton, Mayor Giuliani, or Governor Romney.”

Just something to keep in mind.

Post script: I don’t hate Romney, by the way. I bet he’s a great guy. Would love to have him as a neighbor or to share a decaf iced tea with him. For all I know, he might even make a very good president. My point is that he’s a terrible campaigner and that, over and over again, voters have been unwilling to pull the lever for him. And that’s what ultimately matters for politicians.

A bunch of catch-up items:

* I’ve got another longish essay on Obama’s vanity. I’ll stop writing these pieces when he stops giving me material.

* Galley Friend Mike Russell has a long, angry, awesome defense of David Foster Wallace.

* President Obama wants to remind Americans that just because they elected him president three years ago, they’re not off the hook for being a bunch of racists yet.

* The history of the Nature Boy’s legal and financial problems is yet another depressing chapter in the story that is professional wrestling. Styling and profiling have their costs.

* That over-under we had going on when Perry would overtake Romney in the RCP average was a sucker’s line. Perry passed Romney on 8/24. The next question is, when does Perry open up a double-digit lead? Before, or after, Ron Paul passes Romney? We’ll have more–lots more–on Mitt Romney . . . coming up next!

Yesterday a friend asked me why I was such a Perry fanboy, so I think it’s worth making this caution explicit: I’m not pro-Perry in any meaningful sense. I have no idea if he’d be a good, or even average, president. He probably wouldn’t be my personal preference for the Republican nomination. (I’ll carry a torch for Mitch Daniels until the convention opens in Tampa.) When I say that Perry is very likely to win the nomination and should stand a very good chance (at least even money) of unseating Obama in the general election, I’m not making an argument about moral or intellectual merit.

What I’m trying to do is be as clear-eyed as possible about the politics of the matter. And as a political proposition, I judge Perry to be very, very formidable. (In the same way, I remain convinced that Mitt Romney is a political joke with very little chance of electoral success–and this has nothing to do with whether or not he’s a good guy or would make a good president.)

The fallacy of most political punditry is that people conflate their personal wishes with their analysis. That’s why “analysts” often claim that a given party or candidate would be wildly successful if only they would take positions closer to those which the “analyst” holds themselves.

So when I say that Perry looks like a freight-train, it’s not because I’m a Perry guy and I want him to be president and I think he’ll wind up on Mt. Rushmore. It’s because he’s a disciplined campaigner and a stud politician who knows how to win elections. It’s because he’s positioned to unify the party in ways no other candidate in the race can. It’s because the macro-conditions of the race make Obama extremely vulnerable to any opponent, but particularly to one who can muster the arguments Perry is making. And as evidence that all of this may be true, I’d point to Perry’s launch, which has been the most successful and masterful opening to any presidential campaign I’ve seen, culminating in his jumping +9 points in Rasmussen. As I’ve said before, I believe he’ll overtake Romney in the RCP average in just a few weeks.

So I asked for three betting lines the other day–(1) how long until Perry passed Romney, (2) how long until Romney got painted by the sympathetic liberal media as being the sort of wise, moderate Republican who would have won in a walk once upon a time, and (3) when Hugh Hewitt would abandon ship on Romney’s (latest) doomed campaign.

Today we have answers to all three!

Perry 29%, Romney 18%

Then Richard Cohen stepped up to the plate.

And now we have Hugh Hewitt’s assessment of the Perry campaign. Who does it benefit most? You’ll never guess . . .

The arrival this weekend of Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the race further shatters all the crystal balls brought by all the pundits. Perry upset some Iowa elites by declaring his own rules and timetable, but individual voters in the 2012 caucuses won’t care, and Perry has a powerful appeal to the social conservatives who believe he has the courage, charisma and smarts to return their agenda to the center of the conversation.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin seems to understand that if she sits out 2012 she will forfeit the leadership of the party of faith within the Republican Party (a subparty that exists alongside and in cooperation with the party of growth and the party of national security).

If she plunges in, as more and more observers conclude she will, the values voters spread out in as many directions as mercury spilled upon a tabletop.

All of this leaves Mitt Romney a happy opponent of none of them and constant scourge of President Obama. Romney is the champion of the growth agenda, with only Herman Cain elbowing onto the space. Pawlenty had hoped to campaign in this issues terrain, but the map forced him into a battle with Bachmann and Santorum. It was a battle he admitted Sunday he could not win.

Only Perry seems positioned to make it a quick two-man race, and then only if he can consolidate the evangelicals with the Tea Party small-government activists and do it quickly — in Iowa, in fact.

The New Hampshire-Nevada-Michigan-Florida board is set up well for the Romney campaign, and the deep urgency felt across the party to beat the president has provided the former Massachusetts governor a floor that will not crumble.

“A floor that will not crumble.” Put that one in the vault, right next to the 2009 Limbaugh speech that will be “talked about for decades.” [Quick–what’s your favorite passage? I couldn’t pick just one . . . -ed], Mark Levin’s “extraordinary intellect,” and the rejection of Harriet Miers that “strenghtened the Democrats’ hand” in regards to the Supreme Court.

So I think we have our answer: Hugh Hewitt will jump off the Romney ship the day after he writes his New York Times op-ed tsk-tsking what a mistake Republicans made in rejecting the great man. (I don’t blame him–he’s got books to sell!)

Exit Question: Let’s set a new line–how many primary/caucus victories will Romney notch this time around? I’ll start the over/under at 3.