The Pendragon's Hall

The Pendragon stumbled across a two-days old edition of USA Today and picked it up, being interested by the frontpage interview with soon-to-be Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson. I must say, Thompson sounds like a good second choice if Mitt Romney doesn't work out. But the continued portrayal of Mitt by Democrats is not only annoying, it's entirely unfair. Democratic strategist Bob Beckel wrote in an exchange with conservative commentator Cal Thomas that Romney "makes John Kerry look bolted down." The Pendragon has heard this charge a lot lately. But it has no basis in fact. Beckel goes on to say that as "a Republican governor in Democratic Massachusetts" Romney favored abortion, gay rights and gun control, but has disowned these things since becoming a Republican presidential candidate. To which the indignant Pendragon replies Romney has flipped no more than McCain, who is now trying to court the Christian Right. But the charge has no merit. Romney was left on abortion and gay rights (not in favor necessarily) when running for Senate in 1994. As governor, he was staunchly pro-life and pro-traditional marriage. I do not condone him making lavish claims about his support for gun owners, of course, but he has governed as a conservative, even if he once ran as a liberal. He has changed no more than Ronald Reagan did from the 1940s and 50s when he campaigned for Harry Truman as a pro-choice, liberal Democrat to the late 1960s when he became the staunch conservative governor of California. Kerry's problem was really not that he flip-flopped on the issues: people do change. Jesse Jackson changed from pro-life to pro-choice, as did Al Gore. Romney and Reagan changed the other way. Kerry's problem was that he was a staunch liberal who tried to pretend he was not in order to get the votes of middle America. His problem was not that he actually changed, but that he was essentially asking the American people to forget his betrayal of the soldiers in Vietnam and thirty years of liberal voting and believe that somehow, someway, he would magically espouse traditional American values. Of course, on the side he was assuring his liberal billionaire backers that he would continue to promote their agenda. But there would be nothing wrong with Kerry honestly changing his opinion--Bush may have hurt himself by suggesting there was. The problem lay in the fact that the only thing he ever changed was his political rhetoric. Underneath he was as inflexible as critics say George Bush is. This does not exempt Romney from criticism. He raised the eyebrows of an incredulous Pendragon when he announced his support in the last Republican debate for No Child Left Behind--the useless education bill Ted Kennedy hoodwinked George Bush into signing (at least Romney is right on the latest Kennedy tripe to win Bush's support). But the claim that he is a flip-flopper on the issues or that he governed one way and talks another is absolutely false. That's more like Giuliani. Maybe Beckel got them mixed up: Romney's the good-looking one.