ROMNEY'S ELECTORAL STRATEGY IS HIS ECONOMIC STRATEGY: CLAP LOUDER!

Mitt Romney is still struggling to get to 270 electoral votes, and The New York Times notes his strategy for getting there: he's trying to win by claiming he's winning:

Mitt Romney is ... talking with rising confidence about his ability to overtake President Obama in the closing days of the race.

... Cultivating the image that he is a winner, his aides say, could be Mr. Romney’s best strategy for actually winning.

... projecting confidence ... is now a central piece of Mr. Romney’s strategy. He told supporters on Wednesday that the Obama campaign was "slipping and shrinking," a phrase that his aides say he intends to carry into Ohio.

This is reminiscent of what Team Romney did the day after the final debate, as Jonathan Chait noted:

Despite a lack of any evident positive momentum over the last week — indeed, in the face of a slight decline from its post-Denver high — the Romney camp is suddenly bursting with talk that it will not only win but win handily. ("We're going to win," said one of the former Massachusetts governor’s closest advisers. "Seriously, 305 electoral votes.")

This is a bluff. Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This idea that confidence equals winning! ... what does it remind me of? Oh, yes: Romney's notion of how his election would affect the economy, as he described it in the hidden-camera Boca Raton video:

If it looks like I’m going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see -- without actually doing anything -- we'll actually get a boost in the economy.

(Emphasis added.)

The confidence fairy will save the election for Romney! And then the confidence fairy will magically revive the economy!

And then what? The confidence fairy will dismantle Al Qaeda and destroy Iran's nuclear program and magically make the debt go away? Without Romney actually doing anything?