"These Romney campaign 'gaffes,' for lack of a better word, make me think of Freud’s concept of 'the return of the repressed,' in which the tension involved in suppressing an uncomfortable truth occasionally becomes just too much, and the truth rises up, either in what Freud called 'neurotic symptoms' or on the campaign trail as 'gaffes.' You don’t have to be a Freudian to believe that Team Romney’s trouble avoiding their candidate’s actual record reflects the Herculean – and perhaps impossible — effort such deception requires... I think the energy required to suppress the truth... is part of what forces Romney to behave like a robot and speak in bizarre faux-platitudes. Trying to avoid anything remotely controversial, he praises Michigan’s trees for being 'the right height.' Lemonade becomes 'Lemon. Wet. Good.' A chocolate donut becomes 'one of those chocolate, um, chocolate goodies.' The exhausting effort to hide the advantages that come along with a lifetime of wealth results in head-scratching screw-ups like talking about Ann Romney’s two Cadillacs or his NASCAR-team owning friends, offering to make a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry, or making bizarre 'jokes' about being unemployed when talking to unemployed voters. The repressed inevitably returns, and often at the worst moment."
-- Salon's Joan Walsh
While there's no arguing that Romney is a bona fide weirdo, that he lies almost sociopathically and lacks even the most cursory hard-wiring that would allow him to exhibit actual human empathy, I think Walsh is definitely on to something. Romney screws up so wildly so often when it comes to the things he says because the space between his brain and his mouth is a tightrope he's constantly trying to stay balanced on. He can't tell the truth -- about anything -- and it's eating him alive.
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