Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Mitt versus Mitt on Guns (and Everything Else)   [George Conway]

In an editorial entitled "Don't Let the Issues Get in the Way," a suburban Boston paper, the Brockton Enterprise, provides more evidence that the conservative Mitt Romney who is running for president is quite a different politician from the liberal Mitt Romney who was governor of Massachusetts:

We understand that many politicians will say anything, or pander to any special-interest group, to get elected, but Mitt Romney has taken this to extremes. Since it became apparent he was going to run for president, he has changed his position on so many issues that we barely recognize the man who was governor of Massachusetts until this very month.

Romney's explanation is that his positions have evolved. That is fair enough if it involves one or two significant issues — or if a person undergoes a life-changing epiphany. But Romney is still the same old Mormon moderate he always was. The only difference is that he is running for president in a relatively conservative country instead of running for senator or governor in a very liberal state.

That means he has shifted his positions on everything from gay rights to gun control, abortion to taxes. Just last week, he toured a gun show in Florida with the president of the National Rifle Association and reminisced about how as a boy, “I worked on a ranch in Idaho and shot rabbits with a single-shot .22 rifle.” (There goes the PETA vote).

Yet, as governor, he signed some of the toughest gun control laws in the country — and promised “I won't chip away at them” — and was certainly no friend to the NRA back then. In his run for U.S. Senate in 1994, Romney said he supported a ban on assault rifles and the Brady gun control law. But now he has put Massachusetts in his rear-view mirror and it's guns a-blazin' — or .22 pop guns, at least.

In his successful 2002 run for governor, he promised to uphold abortion rights. Today, he says he opposes Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion. Also in 2002 he refused to sign a pledge not to raise taxes as governor, yet a day after leaving office, he signed a “no-taxes pledge” in his run for president.

. . . .

It's all so confusing that it appears almost impossible to pick out the real Romney, which is bad news for the candidate. . . . [V]oters can be forgiven if they get the impression that issues are just minor details that get in the way of Romney's ambition.

The Boston Globe and the AP have more about the two Mitt Romneys on gun control here and here.

01/17 08:24 AM