Ramesh, on the Romney second-guessing:
John Ellis is a smart political observer who argues, as many others do, that Romney should have run as a candidate of “new ideas” rather than a “700 Club” Republican. Well, first off, these things aren’t mutually exclusive (or Republicans would be not just in bad but hopeless shape). But second, there was no way that a pro-choice Mitt Romney could have beaten Rudy Giuliani in the primaries. And once he flipped on that issue, all of the attacks on him as plastic, etc., were baked in the cake.
I agree with everything here except the last sentence. Of course Romney needed to flip-flop on the life issues to have a chance at the nomination, and no doubt he would have taken considerable heat over this switch no matter what. But – to piggyback on Ramesh’s first point – there’s no reason he couldn’t have run as a born-again social conservative and a Gary Hart-style new-ideas man, and if he’d found something interesting and unorthodox to say about health care or taxes or the environment, I think it would have gone a long way to softening his image as a plastic man who'll say anything to get elected. It wasn’t abortion alone that created that image – it was his constant attempt to sell himself as more-hawkish-than-thou on Iran, more-restrictionist-than-thou on immigration, and so forth, to the point where it seemed that the only issues he cared about were ones he’d flip-flopped on. I suspect that if Romney had talked about tax reform for the middle class or a new conservative approach to the environment – or some other issue where his native wonkiness could shine through – half as much as he talked about how his opponents weren’t sufficiently conservative on issues where he himself had only just found right-wing religion, he might have generated more enthusiasm for his candidacy. (And at the very least, he would have given a hostile press corps something else to talk about besides his inauthenticity.)
But who knows – maybe there’s still time for him to find a better justification for his candidacy than this:
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