Romney has never been an ideological crusader, a conviction conservative, or even a committed long-time Republican, which is why his occasional attempts to portray himself as any part of that comes off as phony.
To cite just one example from last Thursday’s debate, Romney has moved all over the map trying to explain why, during his days as an independent, he chose to vote in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary, where he cast a vote for Paul Tsongas. Under fire from Gingrich, Romney implied that was a way to vote against Bill Clinton. He has previously suggested that by voting for Tsongas, he was trying to boost the Democrat he judged most beatable in the fall.
On Thursday, he offered this “clarification’’: “I’ve never voted for a Democrat when there was a Republican on the ballot.’’ That’s simply nonsensical in the context of his Tsongas vote; of course there wasn’t a Republican on the Democratic primary ballot. But in the GOP primary that year, both President George H.W. Bush and challenger Pat Buchanan were on the ballot.
The much more logical explanation inheres in what Romney himself said during his 1994 debate with Ted Kennedy: An independent during the time of Reagan and Bush, he didn’t want to go back to the Reagan-Bush days. Unenamored of either Reagan or George H.W. Bush, Romney was likely genuinely attracted to Tsongas’s socially liberal, fiscally moderate message. No surprise there; after all, that’s the way Romney himself ran in 1994.
His philosophical vagaries notwithstanding, one can say this about Romney: As governor of Massachusetts, he was a good and competent manager. That, however, generally isn’t the kind of thing that stirs heartfelt passion in the Republican soul.
