Free Republic

As a presidential candidate, Republican Mitt Romney says he opposes revenue-boosting tax increases. But back when he was Massachusetts' governor, he bragged about them. The Romney administration in 2004 and 2005 quietly highlighted the state's recent tax and fee hikes as part of an effort to persuade the financial rating agencies Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings to improve the state's bond ratings.The administration's bullet-point presentations to the agencies, made public through freedom of information requests, sought to make the case that Massachusetts had "acted decisively" to address the state's fiscal problems with a combination of streamlining, belt-tightening budget cuts,...

Former Massachusetts governor and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney predicted that President Obama's massive health care bill would be passed by Congress, and he outlined a legislative strategy to overturn the bill by cutting off the funding necessary to implement it. Speaking in Dallas yesterday as part of the publicity tour for his new book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, Romney said that the key to his plan was for the GOP to reclaim majorities in both houses of Congress as well as the White House. Romney said that those members voting for the health care bill...

Washington – The starting bell has just rung for the 2012 presidential election, and the unofficial Republican front-runner is … former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The occasion is the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, which serves as a cattle call for presidential wannabes. For the past three years, Mr. Romney has won the CPAC presidential straw poll, and in recent months, the more scientific surveys usually have shown him coming in first for 2012. Not that any of these early polls mean a whole lot. Two years ago, even as he was winning the CPAC poll, he...

"Now, two weeks before publication of "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness," Romney is pivoting again -- this time pitching himself as a problem solver whose background as a successful financier makes him the ideal candidate to rescue the ailing U.S. economy. But the real problem, said the paper, is "the real Mitt Romney — Harvard MBA, political scion, hard-working businessman, super-wealthy master of Wall Street offerings, devout Mormon — might not be what Republican primary voters actually want."

Big caveat right off the bat: PPP is the same polling firm that predicted a Hoffman landslide in NY-23. But (a) they had Mitt’s favorables comparable with Huckabee’s earlier in the year, so it’s not like their data’s historically been screwy, and (b) this isn’t just a one-month snapshot but a trend dating back to July.