Dean Barnett, ex-blogger, now Weekly Standard writer, has a thoughtful Standard Online piece on Mitt Romney, “A candidate struggling to find his voice.” 

My question is, as one who’s not anti-Romney, call me a Romney Skeptic, does Mitt Romney even know what his real voice is?  Barnett puts his finger on many of Romney’s problems, pandering, strikes people as a politician to the core, etc.  But where Dean has faith, that deep down, Mitt’s the right guy, people just need to know him better, I have only more skepticism.

I think the issue of flip-flopping hits home with the public, not because voters think politicians should never change their minds, but because voters – rightly – see it as code for cynical political calculation, with politicians saying things they don’t really believe in order to win an election.  They’ve seen it so many times before, on everything from Democrats like Kerry who were for the Iraq invasion when it was going well, then against when it started going badly, to budget hawks like McCain who switched their position on ethanol in order to court votes in Iowa, to Al Gore on tobacco. [Author note: Sen. McCain has maintained his opposition to ethanol subsidies, unlike Sen. Thompson, though McCain has changed his view on the overall value of ethanol.]

I seem to recall learning a lesson along the lines of, if you tell the truth, you don’t have to try so hard to remember what you said.  This is where we are with too many politicians.  They insult us in one of two ways, either thinking we’re too stupid to notice, or that our memories are too short to remember the positions they formerly held before they got the whiff of political ambition in their nostrils.

As a conservative who doesn’t like some of Rudy’s social issue positions, my take on Romney is, he had the same positions as Rudy on most of these issues, only Romney changed his position when he started running for President.  Rudy had the integrity to present himself as he is, warts and all.

I’d have more respect for a politician who came forward and at least admitted what he was up to, rather than coming up with these elaborate and often heart wrenching stories about the personal experience that caused them to change their positions.  Some of them are, I’m sure, true, but they are always a little too conveniently timed, and often straight out of a night-time soap.

It’s a bit like the scene in the movie Bull Durham where the flighty, New Agey Susan Sarandon character is telling Kevin Costner character about all the important people she was in her past lives.  Costner finally asks, how come in another life people are never just some schmuck, they’re always someone famous.  Sarandon answers, oh, that’s not the way it works.  No one can ever just be who they are. 

To my mind, calculation and dishonesty and trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes is what brought low the conservative movement and the Republican Party.  For the past five years, too many supposed Party and movement leaders (Ney, Foley, Abramoff, Delay Inc, Cunningham, etc, etc, etc,) played the country, and especially their fellows on the center-right, for great big suckers.  Political Elmer Gantry’s?  They got ahead by pretending to be for the cause, but they were just working angles for themselves.

If our movement is going to thrive again, it must be headed by people of principle and integrity.  Once again, we need people heading our movement who know it’s not about them, people who want to go to Washington in order to DO something, not to BE something.  We need people who will level with us about the problems facing the country, and about who they are and where they stand.