Romney has been all over the campaign trail over the last week blaming the S&P downgrade of US debt on Obama. Romney took full advantage of the downgrade, ignoring what S&P wrote - mainly that the US needed to raise revenues and taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations - and dishonestly pinned the blame on the Obama administration. Which is Romney politics at it's best. But Romney politics also requires Mitt Romney to have had the exact opposite position on the same issue before 2008.
And that other shoe has dropped, Politico has just posted a story showing that when Mitt Romney was lobbying S&P in 2004 to raise Massachusetts' credit rating the state had raised taxes to bring in new revenue, exactly what he's criticizing the Obama administration for wanting to do this year.
Gov. Mitt Romney lobbied the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s in 2004 to raise his state’s credit rating in part because Massachusetts had raised taxes during an economic downturn two years earlier.
The claim was part of a presentation to the ratings agency obtained by POLITICO under a state freedom of information law from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance. The Nov. 4 presentation, stamped “confidential,” helped persuade S&P to raise the state’s grade and handed Romney the perfect talking point for last week’s humiliating national downgrade by the same agency.
But Romney’s case to S&P is a far cry from the anti-tax absolutism of the Republican Party he hopes to lead. Indeed, it bears a far closer resemblance to the right-of-center grand compromise rejected by House Republicans this year — dismissed because it would include new taxes and end tax breaks President Barack Obama described as “loopholes” — or the more modest compromise that passed, than to the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan Romney “applauded.”Mitt Romney, he's held every position on every issue.