Mitt's Surprise?

A piece just went up at The Atlantic web site by an American Enterprise Institute scholar that is a bit of a shocker: From this conservative roost, a research fellow acknowledges--on the day of the second debate--that Romney's numbers might not add up the way he says.

I just love the way Michael Strain puts it: "It is true that if you take Mr. Romney's three promises literally then something has to give." What a sentence! Literally! I guess Republican plans aren't meant to be taken literally. Thanks for cluing the rest of us in after all these years!

Anyway, the importance here is this. I would not be surprised a whit to see Romney tonight back off the 20 percent. Say it's just a "starting point." 

He'd do it to try to look more moderate. Obama should blast him out of the water: "So what DO you stand for? Anything? Taking away insurance coverage from sick people, I guess you stand for that. Bankrupting the Medicare trust fund in four years, I guess you stand for that." And so on. In other words, as I wrote this morning, the more Romney tries to be Mr. Moderate, the more Obama needs to recast it as Romney having no principles at all.