The topic of Paul Krugman’s Friday column was Mitt Romney’s failure to propose a credible jobs plan to bring down the unemployment rate. The upshot of it was that Romney is far less serious about creating jobs than Barack Obama, who, as we know, has not exactly attacked the unemployment problem with the fervor of an FDR.

I’m buying much of Krugman’s argument, including his point that Congressional Republicans, from the get-go, did their best to block any effort to pass legislation that might have reflected well on Obama.

But the main reason to vote for Obama is that he’s not Romney. It is Romney’s phenomenal propensity for lying about matters large and small. It’s the Ted Bundy-esque gap between the facts of his life and how he describes his life to the rest of us.

An example from Krugman:

… Mr. Romney, who started as a business consultant and then moved into the heady world of private equity, insists on portraying himself as a plucky small businessman.

I am not making this up. In Tuesday’s debate, he declared, “I came through small business. I understand how hard it is to start a small business.” In his speech at the Republican convention, he declared, “When I was 37, I helped start a small company.”

Ahem. It’s true that when Bain Capital started, it had only a handful of employees. But it had $37 million in funds, raised from sources that included wealthy Europeans investing through Panamanian shell companies and Central American oligarchs living in Miami while death squads associated with their families ravaged their home nations. Hey, doesn’t every plucky little start-up have access to that kind of financing.. ?

Let’s not even dwell on the truism that great crimes often lurk behind great fortunes. The important thing to remember is that the profoundly bland and proper-seeming Romney makes up a new set of “facts” every time he makes a new speech. He rattles off lies in bunches — bundles, he might say — knowing that most of them will go uncorrected by the media and bolster his credibility with low-information voters, also known as morons.

Being a full-time liar used to be considered a drawback, but times have changed. This year it might turn out to exactly what most of the country wants.