In case you missed it, here's the latest example of Mitt Romney's authenticity problem: his admission in last night's debate that the reason he didn't want undocumented immigrants doing his yard work was that he was seeking office.
We hired a lawn company to mow our lawn, and they had illegal immigrants that were working there. And when that was pointed out to us, we let them go. [...] So we went to the company and we said, look, you can’t have any illegals working on our property. I’m running for office, for Pete’s sake, I can’t have illegals.
For a guy whose number one political challenge is overcoming the impression that he doesn't really have any core convictions and that he's willing to change positions on virtually any issue for the sake of political expediency, that's a hell of a gaffe to make.
But as dumb as it was, I don't think it's anywhere near as big a mistake as his solution for the housing crisis, offered on Monday:
As to what to do for the housing industry specifically, and are there things that you could do to encourage housing?
One is, don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy up homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up, and let it turn around and come back up.
The Obama administration has slow-walked the foreclosure processes that have long existed and as a result we still have a foreclosure overhang.
In other words, we need to evict people more quickly so that investors can snap up underpriced real estate and rent it back to the people who just got kicked out.
That's exactly the kind of thinking you'd expect from a guy whose got a lawn so big he doesn't know who's working on it, and while it might go over well with the investors who stand to benefit, it's not the kind of plan that will go over well with anybody else. (For example, Republican Senator Dean Heller already has come out against Romney's plan, saying it would prolong the crisis by six to eight years.) So Mitt Romney might be the best candidate Republicans have got—but that doesn't make him a good candidate.