Krugman: (Romney) hasn’t offered specifics on his economic policies — but that’s because he can’t.
Mitt Romney is catching a lot of flack from his own side now, which seems premature; although the odds are now against him, this is by no means over. But let me say that even if he does spend election night weeping in his car elevator, his critics from the right are being unfair. Yes, he’s a pretty bad candidate — but the core problem is with his party, not with him.
What, after all, does Romney have to run on? True, he hasn’t offered specifics on his economic policies — but that’s because he can’t. The party base demands tax cuts, but also demands that he pose as a deficit hawk; he can’t do both in any coherent fashion without savaging Medicare and Social Security, yet he’s actually trying to run on the claim that Obama is the threat to Medicare. On fiscal matters, doubletalk and obfuscation are his only options.
First of all, that old standby, national security, isn’t working; between Bush’s Iraq debacle and the fact that Obama was the one who got Bin Laden, the notion that only the GOP will defend America is dead for the foreseeable future. And at this point social issues are cutting the wrong way: there are almost surely more affluent women who will vote against the party of Todd Akin than there are white working-class voters who will punish the Dems for gay marriage.
And underlying it all is the diminishing whiteness of the American electorate.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/sympathy-for-the-doofus/