Mr. Romney's unusual view on honesty to voters

My most vivid recollection of last winters debates was a response by  Mr. Romney.  He was challenged because a questioner thought Mr. Romney had ignored his question to make a statement the questioner thought was unrelated. Mr Romney responded to the challenge by saying it was his prerogative to say what he choose to say rather than answer the question.  I thought at the time it was an extraordinary statement.  Sure candidates talk around embarrassing questions all the time, so it is not like Mr. Romney was behaving unusually.  But most candidates at least pay lip service to forthrightness as they dodge and weave.  
I took Mr. Romney's statement to mean two things - 
1.  He was either not comfortable about making false statements about what he was doing or was not going to waste the time inventing a charade to pretend he was answering the question.
2.  More importantly he feels no need to disguise the fact he is willing to mislead voters to try to get them to vote for him. 
Recently his campaign again exhibited this truly extraordinary disrespect for voters.  He has evidently been running adds in a number of swing states that a whole pack of independent fact checkers, from bloggers up to the New York times, have said are essentially lies.
His campaigns official response?  Not to challenge the fact checkers facts or logic (which suggests the fact checkers are right on the facts).  Instead the campaign simply said they were not going to let fact checkers dictate their campaign strategy and they have continued to run the ads.
In a sense Mr. Romney's evident disdain for the need to tell voters the truth makes perfect sense in the Republican world of Fox news, Rush Limbaugh etc who operate from the basic presumption that anyone who disagree's with them is wrong and evil.  It is really a sign of how that rabid wing of the Republican party has become so disproportionately powerful in the party that a fundamentally pragmatic guy like Romney, who clearly is not an accomplished liar, has to be willing to lie to hope to get elected.