Too Many Mitts

The Salt Lake City Tribune, the most widely read paper in that most Mormon of states, has endorsed Barack Obama. The problem, they say, is that you can't believe a word Mitt Romney says:

From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: "Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?"

The evidence suggests no clear answer, or at least one that would survive Romney’s next speech or sound bite. Politicians routinely tailor their words to suit an audience. Romney, though, is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear.

Obama also picked up another endorsement recently: that of Nobel laureates, mostly physicists, chemist and medical researchers. These are the people who came up with the basic science that our tech-based economy is based on. And while not an endorsement, Scientific American also ranked Romney's and Obama's responses to a set of questions concerning science and technology, and gave Obama an overall higher grade. Most interestingly, they gave Romney a zero (0) on something near and dear to all our hearts: the Internet.

Do endorsements like these make a difference? Certainly not among partisans. And the Tribune's endorsement is unlikely to affect the outcome in Utah, where issues such as gay marriage trump all reason.

But such endorsements could influence undecided voters across the country. If the paper in Romney's spiritual homeland, where he is considered a saint for saving the winter Olympics, cannot stomach his cynical two-, three- and four-faced pandering, that really says something about the depths to which he's sunk.