The WaPo has a piece on Mitt Romney titled “Romney Struggles to Define Abortion Stance:”
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said this week that as president he would allow individual states to keep abortion legal, two weeks after telling a national television audience that he supports a constitutional amendment to ban the procedure nationwide.
In an interview with a Nevada television station on Tuesday, Romney said Roe. v. Wade should be abolished and vowed to “let states make their own decision in this regard.” On Aug. 6, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he supports a human life amendment to the Constitution that would protect the unborn.
“I do support the Republican platform, and I do support that being part of the Republican platform, and I’m pro-life,” Romney said in the ABC interview, broadcast days before his victory among conservative Iowa voters in the Ames straw poll.
The two very different statements reflect the challenge for Romney, who has reinvented himself as a champion of the antiabortion movement in recent years and is seeking to become the conservative alternative to former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in the battle for the Republican presidential nomination.
Romney’s stance on abortion is crystal clear and as unnuanced as it gets. His position is whatever will get him the most votes. I kinda almost feel sorry for the guy.
cleek
i feel sorry for the people who support him.
dingo
Kind of like lying to become the Captain of the Titanic. Why bother?
Psycheout
Actually if you don’t like something he says, wait a couple of days and he’ll have said the opposite. I suspect his supporters just think his positions match theirs. He’s a political chameleon.
I wonder if he actually stands for anything other than himself. Somehow I doubt it.
Mittens is certainly the “say anything” candidate. Slick Willard.
Pb
Mitt Romney isn’t a flip-flopper so much as he’s just in constant rotation at this point. I’m going to start calling him “Merry-Go-Round Mitt”. Where he stops, nobody knows!
Cyrus
To recap, the Republican field consists of a Mormon center-left governor of an infamously liberal state who is now running to the right of himself circa last week, a tempermental, dictatorial New Yorker whose personal life makes Bill Clinton look like Jimmy Carter, admirable and principled outsiders who want to return to the gold standard and teach creationism in school, an unspecified number of people who think illegal immigration is really, really, really awful… and you know, I haven’t heard from McCain or [Fred] Thompson in weeks. They’re still alive, right?
I know I shouldn’t get complacent because liberals dismissed Bush in the same way and the election is a long way off and everything, but still, this is pretty entertaining. I feel sorry for all the sane, honest, good people who still identify with the Republican Party for some reason, like personal loyalty or its stated platform. All three of them.
The Other Steve
Did you see the Rasmussen poll that showed Romney has a higher “Absolutely will not vote for this asshole” than Hillary?
Even more astounding, of that “will not vote”, it was 25% of Republicans… a much much higher ratio than Clinton has with Democrats.
Go Romney!
The Other Steve
Yes, Fred Thompson was seen just last week driving a golf cart at the Iowa state fair.
However, he still isn’t a candidate and has not yet filed paperwork forming an exploratory committee. So he may end up getting busted by the FEC.
Zifnab
Who? The schizophrenics?
OxyCon
Romney’s position depends on what office he is running for.
Face
Shorter Mitt: I don’t support abortions, but I won’t be banning coat hangers. Or Plan B. Or Planned Parenthood. Or vacuum cleaners….
yet another jeff
When asked to clarify, Romney stated, “We must always move forward not back, up not down, and twirling…always twirling.”
RSA
Or voters who pick a candidate based on who’s the most “extremely handsome man”?
Mike
You’re assuming he’ll wind up with only one.
Dreggas
people with MPD deserve representation too!!!
Cyrus
Seriously? LOL. That would rule. I knew he hadn’t officially declared, but not that there might be legal repercussions for that. So I Googled, and sure enough, a legal complaint was filed. There were also some news stories on it.
Well, at first, it seems kind of unfortunate… not undemocratic, I guess, but something like that… if a candidacy gets derailed because a reporting requirement turns into a major legal problem. On the other hand, though, we’re not talking about an honest accident on some reporting form, we’re talking about what is pretty obviously a deliberate decision by Thompson to meet the letter of the law but not its spirit. If he isn’t actually doing even that much, well, all’s fair.
Zifnab
I thought that was a toss up between Dennis Kuccinich for having a hot wife and Fred Thompson for wearing so much Aqua Velva that Chris Mathews could smell him across the state line.
Tsulagi
Unfortunately, since Brownback doesn’t look like he’s going to rise very high above his snowflake base, for the comedy I want Romney. So you can hear things like this from the Beauchamp giant killers at RedState that came from a frontpager: “I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Romney’s most recent position.” Gold from The Base.
Mr Furious
Romney’s an empty suit. He reads the speech put in front of him to please the audience on the other side of the podium.
At the Right to Life Convention he went as far as carefully dropping all the buzz-phrases to take a stance not just pro-life, but against contraception.