Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Who is Mitt Romney? Despite rising support, his flip-flopping still nags

Republican candidate’s conflicting positions on key issues have kept voters from fully embracing him

Romney Ralley at Brady Industries

Steve Marcus

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks during a rally at Brady Industries Wednesday, February 1, 2012.

Romney Rally at Brady Industries

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks during a rally at Brady Industries Wednesday, February 1, 2012. Launch slideshow »
Click to enlarge photo

J. Patrick Coolican

Earlier this week the website BuzzFeed posted a video entitled, “A Mitt Romney Vs. Mitt Romney Debate.”

Until he joined BuzzFeed, Andrew Kaczynski was a YouTube hound with a knack for finding obscure and devastating videos of politicians contradicting themselves. This Romney bit doesn’t disappoint.

Here he is in 1994 describing his commitment to abortion rights, in part because of a relative who died after an illegal abortion. Later, he says he’s “firmly pro-life.”

Here he is decrying money in politics. Later, he says he’ll repeal the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that prohibited big, unlimited donations from corporations and unions.

Here he is saying, “I support universal health care.” Then, of course, later he passed a health care law in Massachusetts, including a mandate that everyone have health insurance, that was in some respects the model for President Barack Obama’s own health care law. Now Romney is now sharply critical of the Obama health care plan.

Romney once believed in a path to citizenship for people here illegally if they met certain conditions. Now he’s against that and even opposes the DREAM Act, which would give citizenship to people brought here illegally as children who are in college or want to sign up for the military.

Romney, of course, was not long ago a Republican governor of heavily Democratic Massachusetts and was relatively popular with Democratic voters due to his moderation.

If not for the buffoonery of the rest of the Republican field, the Kaczynski video could have been a devastating career-ender. Instead, he’s the presumptive nominee, and Republican voters are warming to him.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with changing your mind about issues. In fact, I prefer some flexibility, an elected leader who will look at the evidence and change course if the evidence warrants. Is that what happened here?

In every single case, Romney’s position changed to become aligned with the Republican Party’s increasingly conservative primary voters. Many Americans, given children and time in the private sector and in the suburbs, become more conservative as they get older. But Romney experienced a rather startling transformation of his political ideology, in his 50s.

Was there some Whittaker Chambers moment when he decided his moderation was some great sickness of the soul? As a rule I don’t read politicians’ memoirs, which are terrible, so forgive me if Romney explained all this in his book “No Apology,” though I suspect from the obnoxious title he spent most of his time misrepresenting Obama’s foreign policy.

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that like early Republican primary voters who have made Romney the presumptive nominee but not quite fully embraced him, my question is, who exactly is Mitt Romney?

In front of a big crowd Wednesday at Brady Industries, a janitorial and sanitation wholesaler, Romney showed how he’s been able to overcome the stench that must hang on a Massachusetts moderate. He inspires devotion despite his prior ideological heresies because he’s the Republican ideal — wildly successful, father of a large and loving brood, a leader in his church, a picture of happy health. He attacked Obama for “appeasing” our enemies and “attacking” business, but there was also an unmistakable tribal element to his presentation: I’m one of you — and by implication, Obama is not. And it’s time we got back in charge.

In important respects, this question of his ideology doesn’t even matter. The Republican Party’s conservative ideology — now to the right of its icon Ronald Reagan — is institutionalized in Washington. There are few, if any, moderate Republicans in the House and just a handful in the Senate. (By contrast, Obama had to deal with a large bloc of moderates in the Blue Dog Coalition during his first two years.) The conservative media enforces ideological discipline. And as president Romney would choose from a talent pool made up almost entirely of people who grew up in “the movement.”

Romney may be a shameless cynic, but he’s also analytically astute, which is comforting because this may prevent him from launching an unnecessary war based on his “gut.”

But who knows? Maybe Romney will tell us he’s changed his mind and is now firmly going with his gut.

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