Mitt Romney is known to be a bit of a political windsock. When he was governor of Massachusetts, he was considered fairly liberal for a Republican. He was in favor of abortion access for women. He helped create "Romneycare", which was more progressive than anything occurring at the national level.

When he ran for president in 2008, and especially so in 2012, the old Romney was cast aside, and a new Romney was revealed. The new Romney was "severely conservative", he wanted to end abortions in all cases, including rape and incest. He hedged on Romneycare, saying that was the right thing for MA, but Obamacare was horribly wrong for the country.

As he began winning primaries, and it became clear he was the front-runner and likely candidate, it began to occur to the campaign that his hard-right turn for the primaries needed to be "corrected" for the general election. Romney senior campaign advisor Eric Fehrnstrom let slip in a March interview that they would be shaking the etch-a-sketch to reset all his policy positions. It was a damning remark, because it put truth to the notion that Romney has no convictions to his positions. He is as comfortable changing his positions as he is changing his expensive suits.

It's unclear whether it's the general malaise and lack of enthusiasm for Romney, or the hangover from the economic crash of 2008 still hurts, or that people have looked at what President Obama has accomplished and blame Congress for what he hasn't gotten done, but Romney's poll numbers have never been very good. He has been struglling to really just pull even with Obama, and it seems pretty clear that unless a major seismic shift occurs, he is headed for defeat.

His solution? Reboot the campaign... which he has tried several times.

His first big reboot was picking Ryan for his running mate. It was an odd reboot, occurring early on a Saturday morning, virtually ensuring it would be "old" news by the time the weekday news cycle reved back up. Ryan was supposed to bring economic gravitas to the campaign, and some youthful energy, but it mostly reminded everyone that Romney had supported Ryan's budget plan that involved privatizing Medicare. End result? Nada.

Next up was the Republican National Convention. This was supposed to be the big moment when Romney was "introduced" to the country (as if the country wasn't already well aware of who he was; what he stood for, of course, nobody really knew and still doesn't). This too was a failure, as Romney was upstaged by a bizarre performance art piece by actor Clint Eastwood. Romney's wooden recitation of his speech was soporific and quickly forgotten as everyone focused on the empty chair.

By early September with 50 days left until the general election, Romney decided it was time (again) to reboot the campaign, this time by (finally) putting some specifics to his general plan outlines. Yes, voters deserved to know the specifics... but as a tool for pumping some air into his deflating campaign? Sorry - no go.

He tried again a couple weeks later with a more general reboot, in which he was going to go on the attack and "prove" that President Obama was a failure. That lasted about 24 hours, because the next day Mother Jones released the infamous 47% video. His reboot didn't even get a chance to display the login screen before a full system crash.

Finally - we had the debates on Wednesday. To many Romney supporters THIS was finally the moment when Americans got to meet the "real" Romney. Many people felt Romney won. What I saw was an aggressive pompous self-centered arrogant empty suit disavowing everything he had campaigned on and proclaimed on his campaign's website for the previous 9 months. It showed to me that the "real" Romney not only did not have the courage of his convictions - he didn't have ANY convictions. Apparently, I was not the only one, because from what I've seen, Romney got a 2 percent polling bump, and President Obama got a one percent bump. That's less than the margin of error for any poll.

As if to put an exclamation point on the reality that Romney will say whatever he thinks will get him elected, he declared the day after the debates that he was completely wrong with his 47% comments. That is a far cry from his original defense that the comments were "inelegantly stated".

Who is Mitt Romney? Every time he "reboots" it's as if a new changeling has arrived on our doorstep, ready to convince us that he is the REAL Mitt Romney. At this point, I don't think he even knows who he is himself. If rebooting this many times has not fixed the problem, then perhaps the problem is the operating system itself.