In an interview with the Weekly Standard, Mitt Romney admits he’s being deliberately vague about his plans for sweeping cuts to federal programs, because if he gets specific he would lose the election.

One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” Romney recalled. “So I think it’s important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies. So for instance, I anticipate that housing vouchers will be turned over to the states rather than be administered at the federal level, and so at this point I think of the programs to be eliminated or to be returned to the states, and we’ll see what consolidation opportunities exist as a result of those program eliminations. So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.

Well, that certainly clarifies something — not Romney’s plans, but his motivation for hiding them.

Romney is also being deliberately vague about his immigration policies: Romney Dodges Immigration Questions.

Mitt Romney refuses to say whether he’d repeal the Obama administration’s decision to stop deporting certain undocumented immigrants.

In an interview with Bob Schieffer�aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee five different times declined to answer whether he would conduct the same policy President Barack Obama on Friday announced his Department of Homeland Security will now pursue.

Instead of answering the question posed, Romney called for a permanent solution.