While Sarah Palin goes the reality show route to boost her popularity and reduce her negatives, Mitt Romney takes a more conventional path to building presidential gravitas: holding forth on the issues of the day in the op-ed pages of the country’s leading newspapers and news websites.

Some of those columns aren’t working well for Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen, who calls out the former Massachusetts governor for his weak attempts to carve out authoritative positions on national and international affairs.

“Former one-term Gov. Mitt Romney (R), in advance of his 2012 presidential campaign, has to identify ways to stay relevant,” writes Benen. “He doesn’t have a job, and isn’t on Fox News’ payroll, so that tends to lead Romney to write op-eds to stay in the game. This strategy would be more effective, though, if Romney’s op-eds were any good.”

Benan notes that a Romney Washington Post op-ed opposing the ratification of a new START nuclear non proliferation treaty was lambasted by GOP foreign policy stalwarts like Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican (and former chairman) on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Gov. Romney offers additional misreadings and myths that have been refuted explicitly in Congressional hearings.” Lugar said.

Sen. John Kerry, the current Foreign Relations chair, chimed in, too. “I have nothing against Massachusetts politicians running for president.” Kerry wrote. “But the world’s most important elected office carries responsibilities, including the duty to check your facts even if you’re in a footrace to the right against Sarah Palin.” Those criticisms didn’t deter Romney from underlining his opposition to the treaty a second time, this time in the Globe.

Then there is Romney’s most recent opus in Tuesday’s USA Today critiquing the “disappointing” tax plan carved out in Washington. Of that effort, Benen says Romney “should at least recognize recent history – Bush’s tax cuts, the ones Romney seeks to protect, didn’t “increase government revenues,” they helped create massive deficits.” He says an earlier Boston Globe op-ed about the economy also was “largely incoherent.”

The National Journal speculates that Romney’s rightward tack on taxes is designed to appease fiscal conservatives who have not forgotten how he paved the way for the Obama administration’s health care reforms not so long ago on the stage at Faneuil Hall. The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of the former governor’s pivot is here and Jay Fitzgerald’s commentary in the Boston Herald is here.

Even though Romney is practicing how to dance around the Massachusetts health care story, Gov. Deval Patrick is happy to take credit for seeing through the implementation of Romneycare. With 98 percent of the state’s residents now covered by health insurance, Patrick boasted in a press release Monday that “health care reform is working in Massachusetts.”

                                                                                                                                                                    –GABRIELLE GURLEY

BEACON HILL

Gov. Patrick‘s budget chief, A&F secretary Jay Gonzalez, says the state is facing a $1 billion to $1.5 billion shortfall next year.

“Greater Boston” has a roundtable discussion of the looming state budget cuts, with Newton Mayor Setti Warren, the next best Democratic hope for everything, one of Emily Rooney’s guests.

On his “Running a Hospital” blog, Paul Levy says the state should borrow from the interest-free federal unemployment fund rather than jacking up the unemployment tax on overburdened businesses.

PATRONAGE GAMES

The public employee union NAGE is on the hunt for court officers who may have lost promotions to lesser-qualified but politically connected candidates. The Boston Herald heads to OCPF and finds some of the top recipients of court officer campaign cash were the same politicians Paul Ware accused of driving patronage inside the Probation Department.

Howie Carr is not wild about the ascension of Heather Bradley, wife Rep. Garrett Bradley, the Hingham Democrat, to the bench.

MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS

Universal Hub takes a quick look at crime numbers released by the Boston Police Department and asks some good questions about why murders are up 50 percent in some districts but down in others.

A problem-plagued housing development could hold even more problems for some Bridgewater officials, the Enterprise reports. A 26-page report citing potential conflicts of interest and alleged violations of state and local laws is being sent to the Inspector General for review and action.

WASHINGTON

Mitt Romney may not like START, but John Kerry seems to have enough votes lined up to pass the nuclear arms control treaty, which would give a big foreign affairs victory to President Obama – as well as to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.

The National Journal reviews all the conventional wisdom on Scott Brown‘s prospects for retaining his US Senate seat in 2012. The consensus of the chattering class: He could keep it, he could lose it. Nobody knows. We’re a really blue state. But it’s not clear that there is a Democrat with real firepower who will run against him.

Evan Bayh and Judd Gregg believe seismic shifts in federal spending will only be triggered by some sort of fiscal disaster – which, they helpfully point out, should arrive sometime around April.  So mark your calendars.

Tea Party sympathizers aren’t such fans of the tax-cuts-for-unemployment-checks trade.

Salon doesn’t have kind words for Spencer Bachus, the Alabama congressman replacing Barney Frank atop the House Financial Services Committee.

GOP lawmakers are preparing to dive into one last earmark orgy before swearing off the stuff for good.

CENSUS JACKPOT

The Census Bureau has released a boatload of data from the American Community Survey. The Globe goes at the data dump like a kid in a candy shop, with an overview piece here and a look at the expanding presence of immigrants in Massachusetts communities. There’s plenty more, including nifty interactive graphs, at Boston.com. Key findings: we’re wicked smaht, getting older, adding population slowly, and have longish commutes.

ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Robert Nelson, writing in The Weekly Standard, says the environmental damage was minimal but the political damage, especially to Democrats, was the biggest effect of the Gulf oil spill.

media

I.F. Stone‘s biographer ponders in The Nation what the iconoclastic muckraker would think about WikiLeaks. His conclusion: Stone “would have loved” it.