Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Littwin has authored an absolutely devastating commentary on the many flip-flops of Mitt Romney, from abortion to immigration. Says Litwin, "One thing you learn quickly out here on the campaign trail: When they say Mitt Romney is too good to be true, they rarely mean it as a compliment."
He quotes Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who wrote that Romney is so "counterfeit" that if "he were a coin, a vending machine would spit him out," and also Time columnist Joe Klein, who wrote that "there isn't the slightest hint of courage or conviction in his stump act."
Those, Littwin says, are "the center-left conventional wisdom on Romney as the plastic candidate."
But it isn't just the Left. Littwin continues:
I am talking to Steve Crosby, who's dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He's a Republican who worked in the Jane Swift administration when she was the acting governor. Romney upstaged Swift, who decided not to run against him in the primary, so there might be hard feelings here.
"He's an immensely capable man," Crosby says of Romney. "He might be a great president. The problem is, I don't know what he'd do as a president. I don't know where the 'there' is. What does he stand for? I don't have a clue."
Crosby said Romney was consistent early in his career as a moderate Republican. But he says Romney saw an opportunity to draw national attention, and that, as a businessman who made hundreds of millions of dollars recognizing opportunities, he couldn't resist.
There was certainly opportunity. The Massachusetts Supreme Court stunned everyone by making gay marriage legal. There was the stem-cell debate. The Democratic National Convention came to Boston. And, of course, there was John Kerry to counter. Crosby says it was all about "profit maximization."
"That's the world he's from," Crosby says. "You shred everything that gets in the way of profit maximization, and you flip it for maximum return. In the business world, that's considered a great thing. In the political world, there are trade-offs."
Trade off too many principles, though, and you risk having people not believe you really stand for anything other than your own upward political progress.
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