The Boston Globe this weekend offered a fascinating analysis of why Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election. But for all the impact of ground games, turnout models and campaign strategies, Mitt Romney lost not because he failed to define himself to the American people, but because he succeeded. At the end of the day, he was inevitably "reduced to caricature, as a calculating man of astounding wealth, a man unable to relate to average folks" because that is who Mitt Romney is. Voters sized him up as a hyper-ambitious, amoral opportunist more than willing to mislead them on almost any topic. As his number one son Tagg revealed to the Globe, Mitt Romney was a liar to the end, still pretending he never wanted to President in the first place.

Tagg, who now provides his father office space at the Solamere Capital private equity firm his parents' $10 million investment and priceless connections helped create, performed one final campaign task for Mitt. How disappointed could his father really be, Tagg suggested, if he never wanted to be President anyway?

"He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life. He had no desire to...run," said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. "If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn't love the attention."

Unfortunately, a mountain of documentation exists which confirms voters' suspicions that Mitt Romney was preparing to run for President of the United States even before he took the oath of office as Governor of Massachusetts 10 years ago. Contrary to the Romney clan's tall tale that it took the intervention of Tagg and Mitt's wife Ann to convince her husband to run again in 2012, Mitt Romney never stopped running even after his bruising GOP primary defeat in 2008: As the New York Times detailed in August:

Not long after Mitt Romney dropped out of the presidential race in early 2008, a titan of New York finance, Julian H. Robertson, flew to Utah to deliver an eye-popping offer.

He asked Mr. Romney to become chief executive of his hedge fund, Tiger Management, for an annual salary of about $30 million, plus investment profits, according to two people told of the discussions...

But Mr. Romney was uninterested. His mind -- and his heart -- were elsewhere, still trained in the raw days after his political defeat not on Wall Street but on the White House and an urgent quest: to be understood by an electorate that had eluded him.

Romney's quest for redemption was well underway by the time Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009:

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During Monday night’s third and final presidential debate, Mitt Romney the hardline hawk turned tail and ran away from almost every foreign policy position he’s held for months. Monday’s Romney backed unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2014, after having previously declared the pull-out be “based upon the conditions on the ground determined by the generals.” The supporter of George W. Bush's war on Saddam Hussein now says, "We don't want another Iraq, we don't want another Afghanistan." He pledged to increase foreign aid, after having promised GOP primary voters he would start every country’s assistance “at zero.” And Romney’s bluster about a drawing a red line at Iran developing a “nuclear capability” just “one screwdriver's turn away from a nuclear weapon” was gone.

Of course, to keep the campaign’s focus on economic issues Romney’s strategy was to neutralize President Obama’s advantage on foreign policy and national security by seemingly adopting it lock, stock and not-so-smoking barrel. The only question left isn’t whether Romney's laughably long list of foreign policy flip-fops, flubs and follies shows his unworthiness to be Commander-in-Chief, but whether voters will punish him for it.

Romney Opposed U.S. Strikes Against Bin Laden in Pakistan. In December, Governor Romney brushed off Chuck Todd's suggestion that President Obama deserved credit for ordering the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden:

"I think in a setting like this one where Osama bin Laden was identified to be hiding in Pakistan, that it was entirely appropriate for this president to move in and to take him out," Romney replied, later adding that "In a similar circumstance, I think other presidents and other candidates, like myself, would do exactly the same thing."

As it turns out, not so much. Throughout 2007 and 2008, then Senator Barack Obama declared "we must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights." Like President Bush and John McCain, Mitt Romney opposed unilateral American action to kill the Al Qaeda chieftain and his henchmen:

"I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours... I don't think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort..."There is a war being waged by terrorists of different types and nature across the world," Romney said. "We want, as a civilized world, to participate with other nations in this civilized effort to help those nations reject the extreme with them."

Of course, Romney's confusion about whether or not to respect Pakistani sovereignty may have something to do with his past reversals about whether or not killing Osama Bin Laden even mattered. After insisting in late April 2007 that "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person," Romney under fire from the right reversed course just three days later and declared of Bin Laden, "He's going to pay, and he will die." (That also explains his ridiculous comment five years ago that "I want to double Guantanamo," and his plans now to revive the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture.)

Romney's comical past on Afghanistan and lack of policy specifics on its present largely explain why the GOP nominee was so noticeably silent on the topic at the Republican National Convention.

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Despite the millions upon millions the oligarchs are pouring into their candidate, they're not running away with the election. Courts are pushing back on their voter suppression initiatives, and they're not getting a margin that guarantees their guy the win.

In the battle for control of our country, they're willing to use every weapon at their disposal. Today's weapon of choice is the employee intimidation spray gun.

Over at Koch Industries, a nice little voter pamphlet went out to 45,000 Georgia Pacific employees. Mike Lux found himself in possession of a copy and let us all in on the secret.

The packet arrived in the mailboxes of all 45,000 Georgia Pacific employees earlier this month. The cover letter, by Koch Industries President and Chief Operating Officer Dave Robertson, read:

While we are typically told before each Presidential election that it is important and historic, I believe the upcoming election will determine what kind of America future generations will inherit.

If we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions in borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies, put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses, prevent or delay important new construction projects, and excessively hinder free trade, then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills.

Enclosed with the letter was a flyer listing Koch-endorsed candidates, beginning with Romney. Robertson’s letter explained: “At the request of many employees, we have also provided a list of candidates in your state that have been supported by Koch companies or by KOCHPAC, our employee political action committee.”

The packet also included an anti-Obama editorial by Charles Koch and a pro-Romney editorial by David Koch. The letter went on to say, “We believe any decision about which candidates to support is—as always—yours and yours alone, based on the factors that are most important to you. Second, we do not support candidates based on their political affiliation.”

In the flyer sent to Oregon employees, all 14 Koch-backed state candidates were Republicans.

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Watch George W. Bush debate Al Gore and claim his tax plan was really great for the middle class and didn't give high-earning taxpayers a break. Then watch Mitt Romney say the very same thing.

Indulge me here for a minute, because there are some common threads which have proven to be outright lies. How do they get away with them? Twisted logic, that's how.

Tax cuts won't add to the deficit. Here's how they get to say this nonsense with a straight face. Republicans do not believe tax cuts factor into the deficit at all. In other words, the deficit is purely a question of spending, and not of revenues. So reducing revenues doesn't increase the deficit because revenues aren't a factor. I did warn you it was twisted.

Republicans care about the deficit. No, no, Republicans don't care about the deficit, and Mitt Romney especially doesn't care about it. Look, he ran Bain Capital as an enterprise that used debt financing to pay millions and millions in profit to investors while leaving ordinary people out of a job and solid businesses bankrupt. So no, he doesn't care about deficits, and neither did Dubya.

Republicans really, really care about the middle class. That Dubya bit at the end of his little rant was so interesting. First he claims that high-income taxpayers will pay "more as a share of the total" than anyone else, as if that isn't already something happening. Then he makes the big case that a family of 4 earning $50,000 per year will walk out with $2,000 more in their pocket at the end of a year, while Gore's plan would only give them $145.

Mitt Romney's tax plan includes letting capital gains go untaxed. Who benefits most from that? Not the middle class taxpayer, who mostly has investments in tax-deferred instruments like IRAs and 401k plans. No, the beneficiary of untaxed capital gains would be people like Mitt Romney and his hedge fund buddies and investors.

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Remember when Mitt Romney used his time with Bain Capital to assure us that he was the only candidate in the race who "understood job creation" because he had been in business and had "turned around" companies?

Yeah. Not so much. Thanks to David Corn over at Mother Jones, we have a new video of a much younger Willard Mitt Romney talking up the purpose of Bain Capital. Here it is in a nutshell straight from Willard himself:

Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit…

Just for some context, in 1985 Ronald Reagan was president, leveraged buyouts were at an all-time high, hostile takeovers were not unusual, and Bain Capital was riding that gravy train. According to Euromoney, 1985 was the year where LBOs doubled, despite warnings by Paul Volcker about their danger.

A 1999 article from Bloomberg Businessweek has a particularly good description of LBOs and their impact on not only the companies, but the investors who "harvest them". The focus of the article is Formica, the laminate manufacturer, who went through three separate LBOs in ten years. While the article discusses the impact on the company's market share and net profits, I think it's also safe to say jobs were considered "deadwood" to be cut away. Here's why Wall Street (and Mitt) loved them:

For instance, Wall Street loves to tout LBO successes. The typical story: Investors buy out the existing company, typically with substantial debt, perhaps 70%. Because of the leverage, the new owners, who own the bulk of the equity, have a strong incentive to aggressively streamline operations and get rid of all the deadwood. When the company is eventually sold, because so little equity was put in the deal, the returns are magnified. Current annual rates of return to the buyout artists are around 25%--below the 35% returns of the late 1980s, but still very lush.

In Formica's case, the private investors came out very well. If you had participated in LBO No. 1 in 1985 and sold out in LBO No. 2 in 1989, when Formica's cash flow was growing at about 14% a year, you would have made four to five times your investment. And if you had held on for 10 years, you would have made $10 for every dollar that you invested.

I liked this description from Jonathan Raban's 1988 book Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America:

It was meant to sound mysterious, for the leveraged buyout was basically a financial conjuring trick, a sleight of hand in which the success of the operator depended on his skill as an illusionist. It was the miracle of the loaves and fishes in reverse. It turned a lot of credit into an even greater quantity of debt, and then, if the illusionist had timed things right, it made a gigantic profit out of the debt.

Mitt Romney knew how to make a profit, how to be an illusionist, how to transfer the risk to individuals investing their retirement accounts in mutual funds and the stock market. What Mitt Romney has never known how to do is create jobs. He just told you that in the video.

It is Romney's profiteering during the most profligate era of our modern times that should repel every ordinary American. When he says he doesn't care about 47 percent of Americans, he's being honest. He didn't care about the people who lost their jobs because Mr. LBO Turnaround Guy loaded their company up with credit and then shut down operations to "streamline" them. His faith is in the Almighty Markets, where work is not a commodity but money and leverage is.

Romney is Reagan redux, with none of the charm and all of the greed.

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If there were any lingering doubts about Mitt Romney's unfitness to serve as Commander-in-Chief, his shameful response to the killings of four Americans at a U.S. consulate in Libya should have put them to rest. Romney didn't know the facts. He didn't know the timeline of events. He didn't know who was responsible for the embassy breaches in Cairo and Benghazi. Yet even before Americans had learned of and could mourn their deaths, Governor Romney used their murdered countrymen to slander the President of the United States. When the proverbial 3 A.M. phone call came, Romney let it go to voice mail, where his pre-recorded message called the President "disgraceful" and charged that Obama "sympathize[d] with those who waged the attacks."

Of course, it shouldn't have taken this appalling episode for Mitt Romney to disqualify himself in the eyes of so many. He long ago proved he lacks the judgment, temperament and steadfastness needed to guide the United States during times of crisis.

Consider, in no particular order, the following examples:

Thanks to multiple deferments, Mitt Romney avoided combat duty in the rice fields of Vietnam by instead serving his church in the tony 16th arrondissement of Paris. But while Time reported in 2007 that "he felt guilty about the draft deferment," during his Senate run in 1994 Mitt acknowledged "he did not have any desire to serve in the military during his college and missionary days." (Ironically, the mockery of France would become a centerpiece of Romney's planned campaigns against Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Barack Obama in 2012.) Regardless, four decades after his time in France, he told Iowa voters in 2007 that his own five sons had a higher calling than the U.S. armed forces in Iraq:

"My sons are all adults and they've made decisions about their careers and they've chosen not to serve in the military and active duty and I respect their decision in that regard. One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I'd be a great president."

And five years ago, would-be President Romney had a message about a potential nightmare facing the United States. Echoing Glenn Beck, Romney warned that "It's this century's nightmare, jihadism - violent, radical Islamic fundamentalism. Their goal is to unite the world under a single jihadist caliphate." And Romney's "they," it turned out, conflated virtually every Muslim, friend or foe, into one, undifferentiated threat:

"But I don't want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there's going to be another and another. This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate."

And asked about that "one person, Osama Bin Laden," Mitt Romney was of two minds. In late April 2007, he announced, "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person." But just days later, Romney reversed course and declared of Bin Laden, "He's going to pay, and he will die."

And thanks to President Obama, die he did. But during his first run for the White House, Mitt Romney opposed the very kind of unilateral U.S. strike in Pakistan candidate Barack Obama promised to carry out against Bin Laden and other high value Al Qaeda targets. Of course, after Bin Laden was killed, Romney repeatedly insisted "I think other presidents and other candidates, like myself, would do exactly the same thing." Put another way, if Mitt Romney gets that phone call at 3 A.M., he'd give you a different answer at 3:15.

That was hardly Romney's first foreign policy turnabout. Four years ago Mitt Romney felt pretty good about killing Saddam Hussein, too. As Byron York noted, during a January 2008 GOP debate, Romney was asked, "Was the war in Iraq a good idea worth the cost in blood and treasure we have spent?" Mitt's response?

"It was the right decision to go into Iraq. I supported it at the time; I support it now."

But despite no new evidence in the intervening three years, by 2011 Multiple Choice Mitt was not so sure:

"Well, if we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction -- if somehow we had been given that information, why, obviously we would not have gone in."

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I just never get tired of hearing Mitt Romney explain that blind trusts are just a ruse, you know?

The rich really are different from you and me. Imagine having $87million in your retirement account:

Before Mitt Romney retired from Bain Capital, the enormously profitable investment firm he founded, he made sure to lock in his gains, both realized and expected, for years to come.

He did so, in part, the way millions of other Americans do — with the tax benefits of an individual retirement account. But he was able to turbocharge the impact of those advantages and other tax breaks in his severance package from Bain in a way that few but the country’s super-rich can ever hope to do.

As a result, his IRA could be worth as much as $87 million, according to his estimates, and he can continue to earn tax-advantaged income from Bain more than a decade after he formally left the firm.

The Republican presidential nominee has been “scrupulous” about observing the tax code, said Romney campaign spokeswoman Michele Davis. “His income is reported and taxed in full compliance with U.S. law, and he has paid 100 percent of what he has owed.” She added that the financial holdings of Romney and his wife, Ann, are managed by a blind trust the Romneys do not control.

Romney’s former colleagues say his retirement package is a well-justified reward for a chief executive who built Bain from scratch in 1984 into a financial powerhouse that backed business successes such as Staples and the Sports Authority.

The structure and tax treatment of his retirement, including the IRA, was legally sound and appropriate, they say, adding that he has earned less money over his career than some other top private-equity executives, who earned billions of dollars during the same period.

Details of Romney’s retirement assets are somewhat vague because he has released only one year of full tax returns and declined to provide additional specifics about his personal finances. But interviews with Bain executives and accounting professionals show that he was able to take advantage of tax benefits in innovative ways open only to a narrow slice of extremely affluent people — mostly those who work in private-equity firms and other investment partnerships.

His severance package, for instance, allowed him to continue sharing in the profits of the company as if he were still a partner managing it, according to his 2010 tax return and interviews with present and former Bain executives. And because he benefited from the firm’s investments as if he were an active Bain partner, he paid taxes at a lower rate on these earnings than if they were treated as ordinary retirement income. Romney negotiated the package when he was leaving the firm, Bain executives said, while he set up his IRA long before.

Among the things largely absent from the 2012 Republican National Convention has been any mention of Bain Capital and any fidelity to the truth. After the first two days, the GOP's twin frauds about welfare and "we built that" were once again demolished, prompting Team Romney to protest that "we're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." Adding to the embarrassment was a prime-time presentation on how to build your small business by selling to the government.

As it turns out, the silence about Mitt Romney's old company (which only ended on the ceonvention's last night) and the Republican sham that "you didn't build it" are related. Because when it comes to Bain Capital, in a very real sense you did build it. After all, your United States tax code doesn't merely allow the "carried interest exemption" that enables the likes of Mitt Romney to pay a lower rate than many middle class families. Without the public subsidy that is the corporate debt interest deduction, there might not be a Bain Capital--or a private equity industry as we know it--at all.

As the history shows, on his road to becoming a $250 million captain of private equity at Bain Capital, Mitt Romney had a lot of help from his uncle. Uncle Sam, that is. Writing in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi explained how:

Essentially, Romney got rich in a business that couldn't exist without a perverse tax break, and he got to keep double his earnings because of another loophole - a pair of bureaucratic accidents that have not only teamed up to threaten us with a Mitt Romney presidency but that make future Romneys far more likely. "Those two tax rules distort the economics of private equity investments, making them much more lucrative than they should be," says Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel at the Center for Tax Justice. "So we get more of that activity than the market would support on its own."

Then-Bain Capital CEO Mitt Romney concluded as much when he acknowledged, "There's a lot greater risk in a startup than there is in acquiring an existing company." So he fatefully redirected his firm from venture investments in new companies like Staples and instead became a leveraged buyout king. To understand both why he did that and how all American taxpayers helped make it possible, a little background is in order.

Private equity owes its success in no small part to that uniquely American provision of the corporate tax code. The New York Times recently helped explain why:

Companies can finance investment from either debt or equity. Companies can finance investment from either debt or equity. But profit on an investment financed with equity -- stock issued by the company -- is taxed. In contrast, if the project is financed with debt, then only the profit after interest payments are made is taxed. This means debt-financed investments are cheaper than equity.

And not just a little cheaper. As the Treasury Department recently explained, "The effective corporate marginal tax rate on new equity-financed investment in equipment is 37 percent in the United States. At the same time, the effective marginal tax rate on the same investment made with debt financing is minus 60 percent--a gap of 97 percentage points." The result:

This creates a bias by corporations toward debt.

Or, for the likes of Mitt Romney, a business model.

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[Note: The video above was uploaded to a fake YouTube account earlier today and we're unable to authenticate it. However, there's no doubt that it is Mitt Romney speaking, nor what he says. For that reason, we're publishing it with the caveat that we cannot identify the source.]

Mitt Romney, speaking to supporters about the factory he visited in China where women were shoehorned into dorms and worked for pennies to save for "becoming married." Ain't it grand?

That factory he visited is likely the one that Bain Capital used to move manufacturing jobs overseas. David Corn broke this story last month:

At the time Romney was acquiring shares in Global-Tech, the firm publicly acknowledged that its strategy was to profit from prominent US companies outsourcing production abroad. On September 4, 1998, Global-Tech issued a press release announcing it was postponing completion of a $30 million expansion of its Dongguan facility because Sunbeam, a prominent American consumer products company and a major client of Global-Tech, was cutting back on outsourcing as part of an overall consolidation. But John C.K. Sham, Global-Tech's president and CEO, said, "Although it appears that customers such as Sunbeam are not outsourcing their manufacturing as quickly as we had anticipated, we still believe that the long-term trend toward outsourcing will continue." Global-Tech, which in mid-1998 announced fiscal year sales of $118.3 million (an increase of 89 percent over the previous year), also manufactured household appliances for Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, Proctor-Silex, Revlon, and Vidal Sassoon, and its chief exec was hoping for more outsourcing from these and other American firms.

In addition to the jobs issue, watch Romney tell this story without batting an eyelash. It doesn't bother anyone that he's describing a factory that employs sweatshop labor so he and his venture capitalist buddies can get richer?

No, of course not, because what we have is "so unique we're sharing it with the world." That magic unique thing would be what, exactly? Exploiting women and making them work for nothing so billionaires become mega-billionaires? What is that magic unique thing we're sharing with the world?

Remember, Romney comes from the land where they loathe child labor laws. I think it's less about what we're sharing with them, and more about what they're sharing with us. Women, behold President Romney's vision for your future.

You knew there had to be one. When you've got the worst candidate on the planet running for President, there's only one thing left to do. Pull out the corporate mudslingers and start tossing it all over the place.

On Friday's edition of Hardball, Michael Smerconish hosted non-partisan spokesman for OpSec -- Gabriel Gomez, and Jon Soltz from VoteVets for a discussion of the OpSec Swiftboat effort.

It's interesting to hear Soltz disclose that he voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and donated to his campaign, but represents an organization of 220,000 veterans who are Republicans, Independents, and Democrats, but nary a peep from Mr. Gomez about his associations.

It's interesting to hear Gomez say he donated to the Obama campaign in 2008 ($230) and fail to disclose his firm's relationship to Bain Capital, a firm Mitt Romney still has much invested in. He attacks Soltz and the 220,000 members of VoteVets as partisan, but nary a peep from Mr. Gomez about his associations.

So be enlightened. Gabriel Gomez is a principal of Advent International, a Boston-based private equity group. All of these equity firms are intertwined with each other through various deals, but Advent and Bain trumpeted their joint acquisition of RBS WorldPay in 2010. One of the participating members of the deal was Sankaty Advisors, the offspring of Sankaty High Yield Capital and other Sankaty entities which have Mitt Romney's brand stamped all over them.

Gomez sort of forgot to tell that part of the story while he was busy being earnest about how much he resents the President not taking all the glory for the capture and killing of Bin Laden. But he should have.