Allow me to state for the record that the title is a play on Allahpundit’s use of the “SECOND LOOK AT…” schtick. I am still firmly in the Fred Thompson camp, and I’m more-likely to jump back on the Duncan Hunter wagon than the Mitt Romney one if Thompson were the first to bolt from the campaign. However, if it came down to Romney versus Rudi McCabee, there is no real doubt I’d go onto the Romney boat.
The right end of the blogosphere is all a-twitter, from Michelle Malkin to Allahpundit to Mary Katharine Ham to Erick at RedState, over Romney-backer Dean Barnett’s piece in today’s New York Times basically complaining that we don’t know the “real Mitt Romney”. I don’t doubt for a minute that Romney is a nice, decent family man. However, Barnett inadvertantly points out the fatal flaw in the Romney campaign; he hasn’t been true to himself. Specifically, Barnett called Romney’s early focus on the social end of conservatism false. While Barnett asserts that this focus was the sole source of of the flip-flop “meme”, it’s Romney’s own record and words that bring the truth to the charges.
What would be worse is a suggestion that there be a refocus completely away from the social conservative end, in what Erick terms “unleashing the real Mitt Romney”. For better or for worse, Romney has made his bets. To change those this late in the game is going to simply reinforce the flip-flop, and if his campaign believes that is the only hope left, they may as well save the remainder of Romney’s fortune and concede. They can, and should, augment their existing messages with a stronger message that Romney knows business.
However, they’re even flubbing that. Once again, Romney is hitting up against the flip-flop card. Back in October, when he was the “inevitable early-stater”, he was unabashedly pro-business. His message, and more-importantly, delivery, on that back then was powerful enough to impress both MKH and me; indeed, my words were, “Romney blew me away.”
Now, he’s jumped on the “middle-class tax cut” canard. I remember a certain ex-President promising a “middle-class tax cut”, only to abandon it the moment he took the oath of office. I know that ex-President isn’t from the same party as Romney, but the principle of “fool me once” seems to ring true.
Even in the economic area, Romney has a major flaw; he is all-too-willing to force a public-private intrusion into private decisions. Specifically, there is precious little difference between MassachusettsCare and the various Democratic “universal” CubaCare mandates; the only significant difference is that Romney at least allows insurance companies a taste of the mandate.
He is also wedded to the idea that the federal government be very-actively involved in research and development; indeed, that is the push of his newest ad. While the rest of the world does exactly that, they also have the suffocating taxes to go along with it. Morever, even with all of that government involvement, most of the breakthroughs in the last 50 years have come from the United States, and most of those breakthroughs have come without a whole lot of government intervention. Coincidence? I think not.
Ultimately, we’re not electing Mr. Congeniality. We have tried that before, most recently in 2000. Like Romney after him, George Bush promoted himself as somebody who could work with Democrats. I believe we all know how far that got him when he found out that the Washington ‘Rats are an arrogant, stubborn bunch completely unwilling to work with anybody except on their terms.
We’re also not electing a manager who bends over parallel to the ground in the slightest of breezes. For all the good that Romney has done out of government, that field of grass is his legacy as a politician.
Cross-posted at the TownHall version of this place.
