"Let's get one thing straight: It's not flip-flopping. It's lying." (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

"Let's get one thing straight: It's not flip-flopping. It's lying." (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

"[Romney's] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed. I know it infuriates them to hear that," Eric Fehrnstrom, senior adviser to the Romney campaign, said. "The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney's advice."

Mitt Romney tells two basic types of lies: the kind where he's feeling awkward and unpopular and is just trying to make his audience like him more, for even an instant, and the brazen, ridiculous, intentional campaign lie. The latter case is where we get a campaign predicated on the idea that you just shake the Etch A Sketch and no one will notice. Just as the idea of the Etch A Sketch originated with Romney campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom, so do some of the most blatant lies. That's certainly the case with Fehrnstrom's new attempt to claim that President Obama's rescue of the American auto industry was all Mitt Romney's idea Fehrnstrom's position is that because Romney called for managed bankruptcy in November 2008, and months and months later Obama did have the auto companies go through managed bankruptcy, Romney deserves credit for Obama's success. There are, as you might imagine, a few tiny problems with this position. First, the auto companies, the people who worked on the auto rescue in the Bush and Obama administrations, and economists outside the process agree, contra Romney , that managed bankruptcy only became possible because of the aid the government gave the auto companies between the time Romney suggested immediate bankruptcy and the time they actually entered that process. What Romney advocated at the time he advocated it has been widely discredited by economists in both parties. No private capital was available to make managed bankruptcy possible; in fact, Bain Capital , the company Romney ran for most of his career, refused to invest.

Second, Romney has continued saying that President Obama rescued the auto industry in the wrong way. In February, he wrote a Detroit News op-ed to that effect. He actually wrote "The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better." Subsequently, challenged on that at a debate, he said "Those monies they put in beforehand were—it was wasted money." But two months and a shake of the Etch A Sketch later, we're supposed to start believing that President Obama did the right thing ... but only because Mitt Romney told him how.

It's not just that Mitt Romney is, personally, a habitual liar. Though he certainly is that, the real issue is that his campaign is calibrated around the idea that blatant mendacity won't be penalized by the media or the Republican base, so lying is an acceptable and politically safe way to try to appeal to independent voters.