From Dana Milbank:
Key to the success of Romney’s Etch a Sketch
movement has been the cooperation of conservatives, who have been
unusually docile in the face of the candidate’s heresies: pledging not
to enact a tax cut that adds to the deficit, promising not to decrease
the share of taxes paid by the wealthy, vowing not to slash education
funding, praising financial regulations, insisting that he would make
health insurers cover preexisting conditions and disavowing his earlier claim that 47 percent of Americans are parasites living off of the government.
At Tuesday night’s debate, Romney continued his sprint to the center. He took pains to say he is “so different” from George W. Bush. He asserted that “every woman in America should have access to contraceptives,”
and, on immigration, he said the children of illegal immigrants “should
have a pathway to become a permanent resident of the United States.”
After a primary battle in which GOP candidates tried to out-tough each
other on immigration, Romney said that he was in agreement with
President Obama and that “I’m not in favor of rounding up people.”
The
conservatives’ complicity seems to be driven by two things: a belief
that Romney’s moves to the middle are mere feints, shifts more in tone
than in substance; and an acceptance that Romney’s rhetorical reversals
are necessary if he is to deny Obama a second term.
“I hear all this as tonal,” Grover Norquist, the Republican purity enforcer and keeper of the antitax pledge,
told me. Romney’s new pledge that his tax cuts wouldn’t increase the
deficit, for example, could be honored simply by using an alternative
accounting method, known as “dynamic scoring,” that conservatives favor.
“You’re now in the general election and you’ve already convinced
conservatives why they should vote for you,” Norquist said of Romney.
“You’re now talking to undecided voters, who have a completely different
set of issues.”
