Jimmy Carter isn’t helping:
“I’d rather have a Democrat but I would be comfortable — I think Romney has shown in the past, in his previous years as a moderate or progressive… that he was fairly competent as a governor and also running the Olympics as you know. He’s a good solid family man and so forth, he’s gone to the extreme right wing positions on some very important issues in order to get the nomination. What he’ll do in the general election, what he’ll do as president I think is different.”
Here’s Obama in Rolling Stone:
“I don’t think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, ‘Everything I’ve said for the last six months, I didn’t mean.’ I’m assuming that he meant it. When you’re running for president, people are paying attention to what you’re saying.”
They’re not talking about the exact same thing. Obama is talking about sincerity, integrity, honesty, and what a candidate can or cannot get away with. Carter is talking about what kind of president Romney would be. But, aside from the sheer political malpractice of Carter’s remarks, here’s where I have a problem.
Romney held one set of positions when he was running for senator and then governor of Massachusetts. He’s been espousing an entirely different, often diametrically opposed, set of positions during this campaign. In all three cases, his positions were well-suited for the office he sought. When Romney became governor, he had to deal with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, so his options were quite limited. He governed within a tight set of constraints. But he didn’t govern much differently from how he campaigned. Now he seeks a new office. What reason do we have to believe that Romney won’t similarly govern as he has campaigned? Why would we expect him to be a brake on a severely conservative Congress? Why should we disbelieve Grover Norquist, for example?
“We’re not nominating a candidate to tell the party what direction to go. All of them ran as Reagan Republicans. We know what we’re doing and who we are — we just want a guy to sign the bills.”
In other words, why should we believe that Mitt Romney governed Massachusetts the way he wanted to? He was a Republican. Wouldn’t he have made different choices if he had a Republican legislature to work with?
The truth is that we don’t really know what is in Mitt Romney’s heart because he never tells us. He just says what he thinks he needs to to advance his political career a few yards down the field. He never stood up to the base of the Republican Party on a single issue during the entirety of his campaign for the nomination, but Jimmy Carter expects him to buck them once in office? Why?
It’s a stupid argument and it is exactly what Romney needs to convince moderates to believe if he is going to win. Carter is a fool on both counts.
