For a candidate who has been running for president for at least six years, Mitt Romney is woefully short of a message or a coherent campaign theme. He has spent much of that time Etch-a-Sketching his positions on health care, abortion, gay rights, Iraq, and pretty much anything he has previously taken a position on. He is a man without a political soul.

However, the lack of a message does not equate to the lack of a strategy. To the contrary, it makes the formation of an effective game plan all the more critical. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, he has not been able to devise a game plan, effective or otherwise. Consequently he has settled on a haphazard approach that consists primarily of hurling wildly dishonest misrepresentations of President Obama’s positions and forcing the President to waste precious campaign time debunking Romney’s lies. It’s a tactic that aims to run out the clock on the campaign and hope that some of the mud sticks to the target. For instance, Romney has flung these spitballs at the President:

“You didn’t build that.” This is a deliberate misquoting of Obama who was actually referring to roads and bridges, not the private businesses that Romney has tried to imply were the subject of the remarks.

“The private sector is doing fine.” This is another misrepresentation where Obama was correctly making a relative comparison of the private sector, which has grown over the past three years, to the public sector, which has been shrinking.

“We tried our plan and it worked.” Here Romney deliberately asserted that Obama was referencing his own record and implying that it had achieved complete success. In fact, Obama has consistently said that more needs to be done and this comment was plainly referencing the success of the Clinton era policies as opposed to the failure of the GOP’s years under Bush’s policies.

“[Obama] removed the requirement of work from welfare.” Most recently Romney made this accusation that is directly refuted by the facts. What Obama did was to permit waivers for states that could affirm their progress in moving people from welfare to work, and allowing them flexibility to enhance their programs. It’s a modification that Romney himself had requested when he was governor of Massachusetts.

These phony attacks are utterly baseless. However, they do require the Obama team to waste time responding. It seems inevitable that Romney intends to continue this tactic of flinging falsehoods rather than focusing on issues that are relevant to voters. He really doesn’t have much choice considering that he won’t reveal any details of his agenda, which would give the candidates something substantive to discuss. What’s more, he is desperate to divert attention from his refusal to release his tax returns, but he doesn’t have anything else legitimate to talk about.

This strategy is creating some peculiar moments in the campaign. This morning Romney unleashed an onslaught of faux outrage over an Obama ad that featured Joe Soptic, a man who lost his job and health insurance as a result of Romney’s vulture capitalism. Romney complained that the ad portrays him as the killer of Soptic’s wife who died of cancer without insurance. Romney’s spokesperson, Andrea Saul showed up on Fox News (where else?) to declare that if the Soptic’s “had been in Massachusetts, under Gov. Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care.” The irony in that statement is that Romney has been feverishly trying to avoid the health care plan he implemented as governor. What’s more, this is an argument that admits that the Soptic’s would have benefited from the plan that Romney now seeks to repeal for all Americans.

The overt dishonesty that Romney has exhibited throughout this campaign, a characteristic observed by his GOP opponents in the primary, is a major contributor to his record low favorability ratings. However, the media does not seem to have caught on. President Obama expressed his disappointment in the “false balance” that is presented in the press. That has been a problem for years. It is simply unacceptable that reporters insist on balancing facts with lies. There is no journalistic requirement that a story about the organic composition of the moon be “balanced” with the opposing opinion that it is really just green cheese. Politicians whine about bias when they are called out for straying from the facts. But the press has an obligation to be biased, so long as it’s a bias for the truth.

A new debate is developing around the reluctance of Mitt Romney to release his tax returns as almost every presidential candidate has for the past forty years. Obviously the prospect of leveling with the American people is abhorrent to Romney as he strains desperately to keep his financial past a deep dark secret.

The new twist is that numerous Republicans and Romney backers are offering him advice on how to deal with the blowback he is suffering for his secrecy. It appears that everyone agrees that continuing to conceal his taxes has been noticeably detrimental to his campaign and that he needs a way out – fast. So conservatives have coordinated a response that they think will shift the focus back to President Obama:

Wayne Allyn Root (TheBlaze): Romney should call a press conference and issue a challenge in front of the nation. He should agree to release more of his tax returns, only if Obama unseals his college records.
Mike Huckabee: Let [Romney] make this challenge. I’ll release my tax returns when Barack Obama releases his college transcripts
Donald Trump: If I were Romney, I would say very simply I will release my returns, which are 100 percent legit, if you release the information that we want
Judson Phillips (Tea Party Nation): There are a lot of records that Americans should want to see from Barack Obama. To start with, there are his records from Occidental College.
Rush Limbaugh: I am calling on Barack Obama to release his Harvard transcripts.
Erick Erickson (CNN): If I were Romney, I would not release them until Barack Obama released his college transcripts.

What a great idea. I am totally in support of this. Even though no candidate has ever had to release college records and it may be a precedent that would be better left unset, in this particular circumstance it could have a beneficial effect. If Obama were to call their bluff and accept this challenge we would finally get to see what Romney is hiding in his tax returns. There is just one problem.

Despite the gathering horde of right-wingers rushing to propose this challenge, there is one very conspicuous player who has not stepped onto the field. That’s right, Mitt Romney has not taken up the call to engage in this political truth-or-dare. Why do you suppose that is? Most likely he cannot risk the prospect of Obama agreeing to trade personal histories with him because of the harm he would endure if voters knew what is in his tax returns. It’s easy for a gaggle of pundits to issue meaningless challenges for which they cannot insure Romney’s compliance, but it is highly unlikely that Romney himself will take it up.

This allegedly spontaneous surge of right-wingers proposing a doc-dump contest is intended to put Obama on the defensive. As usual, Fox News is tightly integrated in the scheme with two of the quotes above (Huckabee and Trump) provided by people on the Fox payroll. Additionally, the quote from Wayne Root is the featured headline atop the Fox Nation web site today. Root’s column is a cornucopia of conspiracy crapola that burnishes his birther status.

Root: Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen?

“Change him back?” When was Obama ever not a U.S. citizen? Even the zaniest of the birther theories assert that Obama’s citizenship was fabricated when he was an infant. Root’s nonsensical musings continue with allegations that Obama rarely attended classes and had inferior grades. Of course, that’s exactly how you get to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduate magna cum laude.

It is notable that while a motley collection of conservative blowhards are trying to goad Obama and Romney into a street fight, there are a few far more authoritative voices that we have yet to hear from on the matter of Romney’s taxes. Arthur B. Culvahouse, Jr. headed up John McCain’s VP vetting operation. Along with campaign manager Rick Davis, and McCain himself, these were the only people known to have seen Romney’s tax returns in recent years. And none of them have stepped forward to confirm Romney’s assertion that he paid taxes in the last ten years. The only comment McCain has made on the subject was that Romney’s taxes had nothing to do with his decision to choose Sarah Palin. He just “thought that Sarah Palin was the better candidate.” Let that sink in for a minute.

As I stated above, I think it would be great if Romney actually had the guts to issue a challenge to Obama to trade tax returns for college transcripts. And I think Obama would jump at the chance. However, there are good reasons for Obama to be reluctant to engage in such a contest. First of all, it is unseemly that no other candidate for president has ever been asked to release his academic records. For some reason, conservatives have selected Obama as the first candidate ever to be subjected to such inquiries. He’s also the first ever to be asked to show a birth certificate. In addition he has been challenged on his religion and his patriotism as well. It’s a pattern that aims to define the country’s first black president as foreign, treasonous, and somehow apart from the rest of America. For that reason it would be unwise to comply with ridiculous demands to prove his fitness to serve. Such demands are concessions to irrational hatred and bigotry.

On the other hand, there is no valid reason for Romney to continue to be obstinate about releasing his tax returns. It complies with a forty year precedent set by his own father. More importantly, it is vital information that voters require to assess the qualifications of someone who seeks to take control of the nation’s economy. Particularly a candidate who has based his whole campaign on his alleged financial acumen.