Presumed GOP nominee Mitt Romney has mentioned New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) as a potential vice presidential pick, and some conservatives think she’d help him win Hispanic voters, but even she is skeptical of Romney’s immigration policy.

In an interview with the Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Martinez acknowledged the problem. “I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign,” she said. Indeed, one recent poll found a startling 68 point gap between Romney and President Obama among Hispanics. “But now there’s an opportunity for Gov. Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why,” she added.

Part of that may be softening his immigration stance, which was among the harshest in the GOP primary. Romney said his immigration policy would be to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they would choose to “self-deport.” But Martinez balked at this. “‘Self-deport?’ What the heck does that mean?” Martinez “snap[ped] at Romano.

Martinez also called for he GOP to “outflank the president–on the left–by proposing its own comprehensive plan” — something that is highly unlikely for Romney to support considering that he’s vowed to veto the DREAM Act and his immigration adviser, the controversial activist behind Arizona’s anti-immigration law, said his candidate will not support any legislation that opens a path to citizenship for immigrants.

But perhaps Romney-Martinez 2012 is not meant to be anyway, as Martinez has repeatedly said she’s not interested in being vice president and Romney is supposedly looking for an “incredibly boring white guy” — criteria which excludes Martinez at least twice over.

In the rare instances that Fox News feels the need for a patina of bipartisan credibility, it turns to “Democratic” pollster Pat Caddell.

Caddell, who worked in the Jimmy Carter administration, has become a regular guest on the network. Though Fox News identifies him as a “former Democratic pollster”, Caddell rarely offers anything approaching a spirited defense of Democrats and/or liberals, choosing instead to reinforce conservative views on issues ranging from health care to the environment to national security.

On Friday night, Caddell was at it again, ripping the Democrats’ recall efforts in Wisconsin on a Tea Party Patriots tele-town hall. As detailed in the group’s Twitter feed, Caddell was on a tirade against “the left”, telling listeners to “stop the anarchy before it spreads.” He called the recall election “senseless” and told listeners to “organize, go door2door now” in order to “defeat the left in WI:”

Caddell claims he’s “still a Democrat,” but he spent much of the last few elections attacking Democratic presidential and congressional nominees, as well as progressive legislative priorities. In 2004, he claimed Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry had “raised more money from financial and special interests and telecommunications special interests, and done their bidding, than anybody in the Senate.” On President Obama, Caddell asked last year, “does this guy have any idea what he is doing?” Of environmentalists, Caddell said their mission is to “basically deconstruct capitalism.”

In other words, Cadell is the perfect Fox News Democrat. As a “Democrat,” he seemingly has the credibility to assure viewers that, yes, all their conservative views are actually correct.

Pat Caddell is no Democrat, he just plays one on TV.

Seeking to combat charges from the Obama campaign that Bain Capital extracted value from companies it purchased by firing employees and cutting benefits, Mitt Romney’s released a web video today profiling Steel Dynamics, one of the companies that Bain invested in.

The ad implies that the plant would not have been built without Romney’s assistance. Steele Dynamics “almost never got started,” the narrator says. “When others shied away, Mitt Romney’s private-sector leadership team stepped in.”

But the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported at the time (via Nexis), that Bain was just one of eight financiers for the project — hardly the lone white knight:

Financing to build the plant is coming from the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, NBD Bank, Fort Wayne National Bank, Lincoln National Life Insurance Co., the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Germany and the Paris Bank. Capital and Bain Capital are also investors.

And while the video touts Romney’s “private-sector” team, the company was successful thanks in part to big government subsidies and grants — $37 million from the state of Indiana and DeKalb County. And as the Los Angeles Times reported in January of this year, the county even raised taxes on residents to help fund the mill:

The county promised $23.4 million in property tax abatements and tax increment finance bonds, as well as a new income tax to generate economic development funds. The latter was required by the state, which shelled out another $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, workforce training and funds for roads.

A new quarter-percent tax on DeKalb County residents financed infrastructure improvements such as roads and railroad exchanges that benefited Steel Dynamics.

Indeed, while Romney and conservative allies have attacked President Obama for employing “corporate welfare” and “crony capitalism” to create green jobs, Romney-backed Steel Dynamics enjoyed government largesse on the local level. As the LA Times noted, “The story of Bain and Steel Dynamics illustrates how Romney, during his business career, made avid use of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be ‘corporate welfare.’”

Bain invested $18.2 million in Steel Dynamics in 1994. Five years later, it sold its stake for $104 million, walking away with $85 million profit.

Wisconsin State Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) is facing a tough recall election against Democrat Lori Compas, and over the weekend he expressed incredulity that Compas was capable of mounting her challenge without the help of her husband and the state’s powerful unions.

“I don’t for one minute believe she is the organizing force behind this whole thing,” Fitzgerald told the Wisconsin State Journal, which reported that “Fitzgerald said he thinks her husband is one of the main forces behind her campaign.”

Compas, a former journalist and freelance photographer who has been trailing Fitzgerald in polls, hit back hard:

“That is pretty insulting, but it does seem in keeping with his general views on women,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to have a lot of respect for them. That’s OK; he can keep underestimating me.”

Compas said that if Fitzgerald really doubts she is a serious candidate, he should accept her invitation to debate. “I have challenged him to five debates,” she said. “If he thinks I can’t handle myself, he should come out and face me.”

Fitzgerald, who voted to repeal Wisconsin’s pay equity law and eliminate all state funding for Planned Parenthood, has already earned the ire of women’s groups across the state, and Planned Parenthood is supporting the recall effort and has endorsed Compas.

In its effort to sell Mitt Romney as someone who understands the economy and knows how to create jobs, one of his campaign’s early talking points was that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital. The campaign repeated the claim throughout the primary, despite a glaring lack of evidence to support it (even Sarah Palin doubted it).

Romney eventually stopped repeating the talking point, which advisers had difficulty defending under pressure, and now it seems Boston has completely Etch A Sketched the number and severely lowered the number of jobs Romney is supposed to have created at Bain.

BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that, in the wake of the Obama campaign’s new ad attacking Romney’s record at Bain, the “new Romney jobs math” is significantly more modest than the old. This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.

This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago. It’s a welcome return to reality, but calls into question any piece of evidence the campaign puts forward. (In 1994, he claimed in an ad that he created 10,000 jobs at Bain.)

Meanwhile, even the “thousands of jobs” figure should be suspect, as the evidence the campaign offers to support it is an editorial from the right-wing Washington Examiner endorsing Romney. Could the Romney campaign not find a single better piece of evidence — a news article, government data, or economist’s estimate, for instance — than an unsubstantiated opinion article from a paper that is simultaneously declaring that it favors Romney’s election?

And his assertion on his record as governor also fails to include the context that his state was 47th out of 50 on job creation.

Conservatives are giddy this morning after Steven Rattner, who oversaw the auto rescue under President Obama, described the Obama campaign’s new ads attacking Mitt Romney’s record destroying jobs at Bain Capital as “unfair.”

The RNC jumped on the video of Rattner on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, while the National Review, Daily Caller, and others were almost immediately up with stories about “former Obama economic adviser Steve Rattner” criticizing the president’s campaign.

But before conservatives pounce, they may want to watch Rattner’s entire remarks, which are really an indictment of Romney.

“Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created 100,000 jobs,” Rattner said. “Bain Capital’s responsibility was never to create 100,000 jobs, or some other number, it was to make profits for its investors.” Rattner — who spent his career at Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street firms — made it clear that he thinks the ad is “unfair” only because it assumes that companies should care about their employees. Watch it:

Technically, of course, Ratter is right — companies’ only legal obligation is to create value for their owners. But as Rattner notes, Romney has built his campaign on claiming that Bain was actually some kind of altruistic job creation machine. Just this morning, Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul said, “Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as Governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation.”

By acknowledging that “Bain Capital’s responsibility was never to create…jobs,” Ratter is unwittingly endorsing the entire message of the Obama campaign ads, which is that Bain prioritized profits for it wealthy owners over jobs and pensions for its middle-class employees.

Prioritizing profit above all else is, of course, fine for someone running a private equity firm. But it’s not likely to win over voters in the fall, so Romney has disingenuously tried to paint Bain as something other than the profit-hungry corporation that it was. The Obama campaign was merely pointing out the human consequences.

Meanwhile, Rattner, who was embroiled in scandal relating to an alleged kickback scheme involving New York state’s pension fund, and paid tens of millions of dollars in settlements after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and New York state filed lawsuits, may not be the best arbiter of fairness in high finance.

Mitt Romney’s campaign is looking to fill its vice presidential slot with a “boring white guy,” according to one Republican who is privy to some details of the campaign’s decision.

Politico reports that Romney is trying his hardest to pick “a deliberate anti-Palin,” and apparently that means he cannot pick a person of color or a woman:

One Republican official familiar with the campaign’s thinking said it will be designed to produce a pick who is safe and, by design, unexciting – a deliberate anti-Palin. The prized pick, said this official: an “incredibly boring white guy.”

Of course, there are plenty of women and people of color who would be perfectly boring — and suitable — choices for Romney’s running mate: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is a crowd favorite, Louisiana Bobby Jindal (R) is about as boring as it gets, and there’s plenty of hubbub over Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH). But the objective of boring, white, and male shows that the Romney campaign will prioritize absolute vanilla-ness over the candidate who may be best for the job.