Romney's "flip-flopper" moniker is well known. But Andrew Sullivan makes the point that in one area Romney has been consistent — "targeting a small minority as a way to advance his own power."

With the Republican primary effectively over, the Obama campaign has apparently decided to take Romney at his word, that he is "severely conservative." Their new video highlights Romney's lurch to the right.

In a move inexplicable in an election year, on March 15 a group of four prominent Republicans announced a new plan to abolish Medicare.

Abandoning promises not to end Medicare or make changes that would affect those at or near retirement age, the latest Republican proposal does both. Promoted by Tea Party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), and Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-SC), the proposal scraps Medicare in favor of a private plan that shifts trillions of dollars of health care costs to the elderly by 2014.

The 65,000 empty seats at Ford Field today when Mitt Romney delivered a speech on the economy seemed an appropriate audience for a candidate who, along with all the other GOP hopefuls, opposed federal recovery assistance for the auto industry. As the Detroit Free Press noted in 2010:

The fact that GM and Chrysler are not only alive but modestly profitable in a weak market, after years of losing billions of dollars when car and truck sales were 50% higher, looks like more than just a successful government intervention. It looks like a flat-out miracle.... And that's about as big a triumph as the president can claim from his first 18 months on the job.

Earlier this month the Romney campaign released an ad slamming fellow GOP candidate Rick Santorum for supporting earmarks. Ironically, it was Romney who, as head of the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee and as Governor of Massachusetts, sought millions in earmarks. In fact the federal government paid a record $1.3 billion in taxpayer money to the Salt Lake City Olympics — money that was used for parking lots, sewer systems, and a horse adoption program.

This from Andrew Sullivan:

Every time you think the ultras in the current GOP won't go there, they do. They'll sabotage economic growth for short term political advantage. They'll sabotage their own president in negotiating with allies. They're happy for the US to default if it means they can damage Obama. Their own plan for immediate, drastic austerity would be catastrophic for the global economy. Their pre-Arab Spring belligerence would shut America out of a critical opportunity to ease tensions with the growing and burgeoning Muslim world. And they have no problem treating the world economy as a partisan plaything.

If they claw their way back to power this way, our system really will be broken for a long time. And the great possibility of an adult conversation on pragmatic grounds to help the economy will be lost. And this is emphatically not Obama's fault. He tried. They threw it back in his face again and again. Which means, I believe, that we should double down in backing him, instead of the ear-splitting whine coming from the left.

The GOP spin machine and complicit media — including, disturbingly, NPR — would like you to believe that the recent special elections are incontrovertible predictors of the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. (See Nate Silver's A Guide to Cutting Through Special Election Spin.)

But while two recent special elections sent Republicans to the House where they already have a majority, two recent national polls show an uptick in Obama's approval, and beating hypothetical presidential challengers.

Alter Net's Joshua Holland has a cogent analysis in TruthOut.org of the discussion in liberal circles of whether Obama should be considered a success or a failure. In a particularly even-handed critique, Holland argues that:

... [T]his is actually a debate over whether one should do what one can within the political constraints of the day, or expend a lot of energy trying to move the political dialogue in one's preferred direction.

Holland also suggests that the Obama political team bears some responsibility for the ambivalence in progressive circles:

Obama didn't promise to do what he could to dig the country out of eight years of disastrous Republican governance: he promised to change Washington – to usher in a new era of comity and reason -- and people believed him. They shouldn't have, because at the end of the day, progressives still faced any number of structural hurdles.

In an earlier commentary, Holland noted:

... [T]he message is as hopelessly naive in the real world of American politics as it is appealing on the stump, and for a simple reason: it assumes that the GOP -- dominated as it is by "movement conservatives" in the Delay-Rove mold -- and it's corporate backers are interested in engaging in a thoughtful debate over how to make America a better country. If that were the case, then bridging the divide through calm words and negotiation would certainly be better by leaps and bounds than the ugly brand of politics we have today