Right On The Right

I'm really starting to like Mitt Romney. He's currently the strongest Conservative candidate in the field, and he's also a fundraising juggernaut. There's been a lot of talk however about whether or not Mitt Romney can shake his somewhat liberal past. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe has a plan for him.

MITT, BE NIMBLE

As a Senate candidate in 1994, Romney was at pains to portray himself as a liberal RINO -- a Republican In Name Only, smartly saluting Roe v. Wade and declaring that he would do more for gay rights than Ted Kennedy.

"Inhibited by a fear of being (gasp!) controversial," I wrote at the time, Romney "is tiptoeing through his campaign, determined to emit no 'shockers' and antagonize no voters." Voters didn't buy his act, and Romney lost in a landslide -- even as Republican Governor Bill Weld, running hard on an agenda of tax cuts, capital punishment, and workfare, was re elected in a cakewalk.

Romney's very public migration rightward over the last few years is a different kind of act, one intended not to hide his real views but to liberate them. In 1994, Romney struck me as an extraordinarily bright, talented, and decent man -- and a political neophyte who fell for the canard that the only way a conservative could win in Massachusetts was by passing for liberal.

Thirteen years later, Romney is where he should have been all along. Yes, it took some tap-dancing and artful dodging to get from there to here, and some voters will wonder which Mitt Romney, the 1994 edition or the one on offer today, is the real deal. Can he put those doubts to rest? If he's going to win his party's nomination, he'll have to.

Romney has been changing steadily over the last twelve years, and he's consistently been showing his Conservative stripes to the world. It's not like Romney said one thing and did another within the same year, like John Kerry. Romney's views have "been liberated" since he's started shifting right, and he'll have to start showing that.