Coddled Candidate: CBS Gives Romney A Pass On Wall Street Deregulation

Mitt Romney's failure to lay out specific plans received another pass in the media this morning when CBS News declined to press Romney on how he would replace Wall Street regulations he has said he will eliminate.

Romney has been adamant that he will repeal Wall Street regulations that were enacted after the financial crisis, a promise the Boston Globe reported is “helping him reap millions from Wall Street contributors.”  Romney has said he would replace those regulations with a “streamlined, modern regulatory framework.”

Exactly what that regulatory framework would look like remains a mystery. A May 2 Boston Globe article noted that Romney has been “nearly silent on how - without the regulation - he would prevent Wall Street from once again engaging in the risky practices that helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.”

Romney's silence on how he would regulate Wall Street after repealing existing regulations was not broken during his interview on CBS.

Asked about comments Vice President Joe Biden made criticizing Republicans for a deregulatory zeal toward Wall Street, Romney said that “we have to have regulation” on Wall Street and protested that “no one is talking about deregulating Wall Street.”

CBS' Anthony Mason and Gayle King passed up the opportunity to press Romney on how exactly how he would replace the regulatory framework, and just what a “streamlined, modern regulatory framework” would look like.

It's difficult to see how this appearance differed from a Romney stump speech. At a recent campaign event in St. Augustine, FL, Romney offered:

[T]he president put in place this big financial regulatory bill known as Dodd-Frank. Eight thousand new pages of regulations have come out. (Boos.) I mean, there's some stories here that are amazing. They -- they have an idea they want to simplify the three-page mortgage form, application form, and -- and so they put out a guide for how to simplify it. (Laughter.) The guide is 1,100 pages, all right? (Laughter.) That's your government at work. (Chuckles.) 

I -- I want to -- I want to make sure we reregulate our financial services sector. We have to have regulation, but we need it modern and up to date. When you have massive regulations, it makes it harder for small banks and regional banks to be able to make the loan modifications they need to make and to also get credit to people. I'm going to go to work to help the housing market in Florida and across the country, and the best thing I can do is to get people good jobs with rising incomes so we can buy homes again. [via Nexis]

Figuring out how Romney plans to do that is the job of journalists.