Mitt Romney spoke to the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference today with some policy observations, misleading statistics and jabs at President Obama. In other words, he killed.

How could he miss? Like a great entertainer, Romney reads the crowd (in this case: glassy-eyed tea-partiers) and tells them exactly what they want to hear. The trouble comes when what they want to hear is by nature contradictory, stubborn and a threat to all life on Earth.

People used to call Obama the true Rorschach test; Romney is the birthday party caricature artist who draws you surfing even though you’ve never even been near an ocean.

He started with foreign policy – something particularly relevant today – but managed to completely ignore everything happening in Egypt and all that’s happened in Iraq over the last two years. He focused on Iran and New START, which gave him the chance to call Obama “weak” – it’s in the Tea-Party dictionary next to “liberal” – and suggest that we don’t have nearly enough nuclear warheads to hold back Russia.

I’m a big fan of writing something once that you can use twice, so if he was speaking at a Lockheed Martin shareholders convention immediately afterwards, I applaud him for being able to recycle the speech.

Then came the litany of contradictions – so close together, I wondered if his aim was to satirically point out the flaws in modern conservative thought. He lashed out at President Obama’s spending on one hand, and then knocked the reduction of spending in Afghanistan on another. He criticized the stimulus and high-speed rail project, and then questioned why more bills weren’t devoted to creating jobs.

It’s like when your coworker asks you where her glasses are while they’re top of her head. You want to say something, but worry about making her feel stupid.

He even trotted out the “care for the unborn” line, which may be a sincere belief for a lot of Americans but probably not for any who, like Romney, said in 1994: “I believe abortion should be safe and legal in this country.”

Romney’s vision for America stops at him being elected President so he can finally stop pandering to us voters, but at least he’s pretending that it also includes slashing spending, increasing spending, focusing on jobs while doing nothing to create jobs, and supporting safe/legal/no abortions.

He paused for laughs after a lot of his assertions, especially the one about President Obama letting us eat “organic cake.” And the joke linking former JP Morgan Chase executive and new chief-of-staff Bill Daley to Chicago mayors Richard J. and Richard M. Daley (though there’s no true link) garnered a lot of chuckles.

One final note he made was to poke fun at Obama’s healthcare law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which mirrored Romney’s own in Massachusetts with its insurance protections and its mandate.

He didn’t pause for laughs after that.