Ahead of tonight's GOP debate in Las Vegas, Mitt Romney tells the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the problem in housing is that banks haven't been allowed to foreclose on enough people, making it more difficult for investors to buy underpriced properties to rent to former homeowners:

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.

Transcript:

Notice that the entire video clip is only 30 seconds long, which was really thoughtful of Mitt, because I'll guarantee you those words will be showing up a in a campaign ad if he gets the GOP's nomination. It's not just that he's saying we need to help banks put more people out of their homes, it's not just that he's saying we need to do it until we hit bottom, it's that he's also saying that then and only then will "investors" feel comfortable buying up homes so that they can rent them out to the people who used to own them.

I'm almost tempted to speculate on whether this kind of thing will hurt Romney with Republicans as well as Democrats and independents, but who am I kidding. The wingnuts love this kind of shit.

Oh, and by the way: Nevada has the nation's highest foreclosure rate. So Mitt Romney is waltzing into the nation's foreclosure capital and telling them they don't have enough foreclosures. Talk about tone deaf. Maybe he's not as good a candidate all the wise people say he is.