The’re off — running to the right to increase their chances of a win…
As the New York Times notes, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney will soon announce “whether” (yeah, right) he’s going to run for the GOP Presidential nomination in 2008. And his biggest problem is his moderate image. So what do you do to mitigate that?
“I think it’s a question that people may ask at some point,” John Campbell III, a Republican state senator in California, said after Mr. Romney spoke to Orange County Republicans in June. “How did this guy get so many Democrats in Massachusetts to support him?”
That is something that many people are asking, especially after last week, when Mr. Romney took conservative positions on two controversial subjects – abortion and the morning-after pill – that appeared to contradict the more moderate stances
he had made in his campaign for governor in 2002 and before.
So you (excuse the word) flip flop ASAP before the primary season.
There is a lot of that going around in the GOP these days:
Mr. Romney’s actions come as two other potential Republican presidential candidates, Gov. George E. Pataki of New York and Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, are also making carefully calibrated decisions on volatile social issues.
Last week, Mr. Frist defied President Bush and many conservative supporters by supporting a bill to increase federal financing for embryonic stem cell research. And this week aides to Mr. Pataki announced that he would veto legislation making the so-called morning-after pill available without a prescription.
Mr. Romney vetoed a similar morning-after bill, but he went much further than Mr. Pataki, who supports abortion rights. Mr. Romney labeled the morning-after drug an “abortion pill” – not just emergency contraception, as the Food and Drug Administration calls it – and wrote an opinion article for The Boston Globe saying that he did not believe that abortion should be legal.
It’s no huge revelation to say that politicians have held their fingers up to the wind and shifted positions for many years.
What’s seemingly new now is how blatantly it’s done: they now hold their middle fingers up to the wind as a message to those who had supported them based on their old positions.
And they’ll probably politically benefit from it (there is a message there somewhere..)…unless voters decide to reward consistency (liberal or conservative) and not expediency.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.