Romney’s timely end

Mitt Romney has been justly criticized for moving far to the right on a whole range of issues in order to pander to conservatives in the presidential campaign. What hasn’t been noted often enough, though, is that Romney never stopped shape-shifting, adopting a range of different personas in order to suit the state of the week. Peter Canellos gets at it nicely in today’s Globe:

In the end, all those inconsistencies combined with a somewhat plastic presence on the stump made Romney seem inauthentic and opportunistic — a meat-and-potatoes car guy in Michigan who morphed into a Pollo Tropico lover in Florida.

Romney furthered those impressions by changing his emphasis in state after state, from being a social conservative in Iowa, to an anti-Washington crusader in New Hampshire, to an economic nationalist in Michigan, to the one true Reaganite who played to right-wing talk shows in the days leading up to Super Tuesday.

By the time Romney took the stage in Boston on Tuesday night, wearing the frozen smile of a politician desperate to stave off defeat, his message had unraveled into a series of generic platitudes and warnings.

Also in the Globe, Joan Vennochi mocked Romney effectively yesterday, and Scot Lehigh comes back with more today.

In the Herald, Peter Gelzinis is on fire:

Mitt Romney’s quest for the White house dissolved under the weight of some very expensive brainwashing by a circle of consultants who sold him on the ludicrous notion that he could become president by running to the right of a genuine war hero.

That would’ve been a tough sell even if Mitt had spent 13 months in Vietnam, rather than two years searching for Mormon converts in the Bordeaux region of France.

But then, when you subscribe to the world according to Rush Limbaugh — the OxyContin-popping Charles Foster Kane of talk radio who bloviates his conservative rant from behind the locked gates of his Florida compound — you’ve already lost touch with a large part of reality.

Personally, I think Republican voters took the measure of Romney’s character and found it lacking. Even by the debased standards of politics, Romney was unusual in his willingness to say anything in order to get elected. Too bad he didn’t realize that’s not the way to get elected.

As Republican political consultant Todd Domke said on WBUR Radio yesterday, if Romney were the person whom he claimed to be, he’d be sailing to the nomination right now.

Further thoughts from the Outraged Liberal, himself a recovering journalist.

Channeling the same wavelength: A Globe editorial refers to Romney’s “shape-shifting,” too.

Photo (cc) by Tim Somero. Some rights reserved.

Not the end of the world

Toward the end of a gloomy assessment of the newspaper business in today’s New York Times comes this:

The paradox is that more people than ever read newspapers, now that some major papers have several times as many readers online as in print. And papers sell more ads than ever, when online ads are included.

That’s more than a paradox. It’s salvation. The consensus view within the business, Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña writes, is that “it could take five to 10 years for the industry’s finances to stabilize and that many of the papers that survive will be smaller and will practice less ambitious journalism.”

I think he’s right on the five- to 10-year time frame, but wrong that news sites (let’s not call them newspapers) will be less ambitious. Perhaps by “less ambitious” he means more focused on local news. That’s true. With a dozens of national and international news sites just a click away, major metropolitan newspapers are going to have to concentrate almost exclusively on local news, sports, business and the arts. But that’s not less ambitious — it’s just different.

The news business has been through several paradigm shifts since taking on a form we’d recognize beginning in the 1830s. The current one may be unusually wrenching. But it only looks like the end of the world because it happens to be the one we’re living through.

It depends on the poll

Democratic political consultant Dan Payne, writing in today’s Globe about Hillary Clinton’s victory in Massachusetts, says, “Once again, pollsters failed to render an accurate snapshot of the race, missing a 56-to-41-percent landslide, making prognosticators like me look bad. This has got to stop or there will be blood.”

Really? The final WBZ-TV/SurveyUSA poll of registered voters, taken on Saturday and Sunday, had Clinton over Barack Obama by a margin of 56 percent to 39 percent. Yes, the WHDH-TV/Suffolk University poll had Obama ahead by two. But SurveyUSA called it almost perfectly.

Casino plan killed yet again

Every week or so, it seems, someone revives the Mashpee Wampanoag proposal to build the world’s largest gambling casino in Middleborough for the sole purpose of killing it again. So it is today. Stephanie Vosk and George Brennan report in the Cape Cod Times that state officials have decided to oppose the plan.

This comes on top of last week’s news that the town of Mashpee has asked the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs to call a halt to the proceedings. Thus, even if Gov. Deval Patrick wins his bid to build three casinos in Massachusetts, it’s highly unlikely that one of them will be in Middleborough.

Chris Matthews chills out

In my latest for the Guardian, I describe my evening with in front of the TV set with Chris Matthews, the MSNBC blowhard who jumped the shark with his over-the-top anti-Hillary Clinton tirades following Iowa and New Hampshire. The new Matthews seems slightly diminished, but his political knowledge and enthusiasm are unflagging.

No surprises in Mass.

No live blogging tonight, except to observe that rumors of Hillary Clinton’s and Mitt Romney’s demise in Massachusetts were greatly exaggerated. My record of making predictions is pretty grim, but I’ll give myself a mild pat on the back for this. I’ll have further thoughts on the media and Super Tuesday in the Guardian tomorrow afternoon.

News is a (nasty) conversation

The participatory model of journalism is one of the more interesting experiments taking place in news these days. But it’s got a downside. Adam Gaffin posts this item about the comments sections being shut down at three local GateHouse weeklies — the Somerville Journal, the Swampscott Reporter and, now, the Cambridge Chronicle.

It’s a shame, but I’m not surprised. Sooner rather than later, news orgs are going to have to move away from allowing anonymous and pseudonymous comments and instead require people to post under their real names. Right now, no editor dares to take that step on the theory that the comments will disappear. But it has to happen.

Busy editors and reporters don’t have time to monitor every anonymous comment as it comes in. This isn’t about technology; it’s about common sense. Letters to the editor are rarely published without the writer’s name attached. If anything, online comments, which are posted automatically and without editing, ought to be held to a higher standard.

Pictures from a polling place

I got back from voting a little while ago. While I was there, I took a few pictures to upload to the Polling Place Photo Project, started by Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net and now hosted by the New York Times.

I zipped off four photos to the project, which you can see here. (At right is Salem News reporter Ethan Forman, who’s interviewing a voter outside Danvers High School.) The idea is to supplement election coverage with a little citizen journalism, combining professional with amateur contributions. When it comes to photography, I certainly qualify as an amateur.

Here is Rosen’s original essay on the purpose of the project.

The site is slow today — no surprise, given that it’s Super Tuesday. I imagine things will be quite a bit busier later today, when people start getting out of work.

Rosen and the other folks behind the project hope this will somehow lead to a better voting experience. Perhaps. Certainly there’s a possibility that some real problems will be documented by camera-wielding citizens.

If nothing else, though, the project shows that professional and amateur journalists can work together to produce something that’s both interesting and worthwhile.