December 18, 2007

GNW Pick: Mitt-Flop flops on 'Meet the Press'

Posted by: Chris

I'm separating out my Editor's Pick from the GNW 5 from now on so the posts aren't so long. My choice this time is Mitt Romney's appearance on "Meet The Press" on Sunday (video here, transcript here).

• "Romney insists he'll stick to anti-gay, abortion views": QUICK LOOK: Republican Mitt Romney sought Sunday to deflect charges that he is a flip-flopper, insisting he had learned from experience and could be counted on to keep his campaign... (MORE)

The hour-long interview did nothing to dispel his image as a craven politician willing to say or do almost anything to win office. As usual, Tim Russert was methodical and relentleess, eschewing all talk of the horse race by going point by point through all the issue areas where Romney had flip-flopped: abortion, gun control, immigration, gay rights, health care, taxes and the list goes on.

Romney is smart and articulate and had explanations for each position change, but none was satisfactory and the cumulative effect was devastating. Here was a businessman-turned-politician who treats his policy views as the equivalent of a corporate marketing strategy. If the target market changes, so does the pitch. Every politician engages in some of that, and Bill Clinton is at least partially right that Barack Obama has the advantage of being so new to the national stage that he hasn't had to do so on the big issues of the day. But Romney is the worst in recent memory.

The clincher for me, and it surprises me that Russert didn't pick up on it, was near the end of the hour-long interview, when Romney tried to move to the offensive, constrasting his "evolution" on stem cell research with what he claims was a 180 by Hillary Clinton:

In terms of funding, I think the best source of our funding application should be in what are known as alternative methods.  And this just recent.  I've been, as you know, fighting for this for some time.  But this recently saw a major breakthrough with direct reprogramming of, of human adult cells to become stem cells that can be very potent cells applied to help cure disease and, and serious conditions. 

Now, interestingly, Hillary Clinton voted for these alternative method technologies when she was first faced with it.  But then as she became a presidential candidate, she was one of 28 to vote against alternative methods.  She put politics ahead of people.

You get that? A man who has changed his mind more times than he has made it up tells us, when he sees a similar "evolution" in someone else, that she "put politics ahead of people." It takes one to know one, Governor Romney.

For a complete news summary, click or bookmark:  gaynewswatch.com/GOPprimary

Tags: gay rights, Meet the Press, Mitt Romney