In the past week, Barack Obama has run a more effective campaign against Mitt Romney than any of Romney’s opponents for the Republican presidential nomination. Top Obama strategist David Axelrod hit the former Massachusetts governor hard with charges of flip-flopping on abortion, health care, the environment and other issues. “We’re having this call because Gov. Romney has been so brazen in his switches of position,” Axelrod said in a conference call with reporters last week. “You get the feeling that there is no principle too large for him to throw over in pursuit of political office,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Axelrod has nothing good to say about the GOP field’s efforts to take on Romney. Assessing Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Axelrod said simply, “He hasn’t exactly gotten the gun out of the holster.”
Axelrod’s critique irritates many Republicans, but he’s doing them a favor. For all his strengths, if Romney becomes the GOP nominee, he will bring significant weaknesses to the race. And so far, at least, Romney’s Republican rivals have not effectively exploited those weaknesses. The Obama campaign will.
By far, Romney’s biggest weakness is his history of changing positions — better known as flip-flops. And by far the biggest Romney flip-flop is his change of position on abortion. Running for Senate from Massachusetts in 1994, and again for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney was strongly pro-choice; he vowed over and over to protect a woman’s right to choose. But in 2004 and 2005, after a debate over stem-cell research in Massachusetts, he became strongly pro-life. That also just happened to be the time he began planning his first run for president.
The abortion flip-flop was a problem for Romney in 2007 and 2008, especially in Iowa. It might well have cost him the caucuses. Today, Romney’s advisers believe the issue has been thoroughly aired and debated to the point where it is not really an issue anymore.
That might be true for Republicans in Iowa, and perhaps for GOP voters in New Hampshire, too. But Romney’s change on abortion has not been vetted with voters nationwide, and it’s a sure bet Obama will use it against Romney in a general election contest. The pro-choice Obama won’t be making a point about abortion. What he’ll tell voters is that Romney is a man who has switched sides many times, starting with abortion and later on health care, the environment, and other issues. “Can you really trust this man?” the president will ask.
Perry tried to do that at the Fox News Republican debate in Orlando, but mangled his words so badly that the point was lost. On other occasions, Perry has chosen to go after Romney’s changes on some issues — universal health care, climate change — but not on abortion. “We have chosen to focus our flip-flop critiques on more recent position changes,” says a Perry adviser who asked to go unnamed, “changing positions on Romneycare, Obamacare, the editing of [Romney’s] book, environmental policy. There is certainly time to talk about the flip-flops on abortion and gun rights and other issues.”
The Perry aide says the campaign is “leaving open the option” of bringing up Romney’s change on abortion. The aide would not say whether Perry would take that course but did suggest that “voters have a very difficult time trusting politicians whose core philosophy and positions change with the wind.” In other words, more attacks could be on the way. Given Perry’s slide in the polls, though, it might be too late to help.
Will flip-flopping really be a big vulnerability for Romney? If he makes it to the general election, he’ll certainly have plenty of material to use against Obama, and if the election were held today, it seems likely that voters would hold the terrible economy against the president more than they would hold flip-flops against Romney. One Romney aide likened Axelrod’s recent campaign to a magician using misdirection to distract an audience during a trick. “In this case, the trick is getting Obama re-elected despite his failures on the economy,” the aide said. “I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more hocus pocus out of this White House.”
Whatever the case, a Republican nominee Romney would be a stronger general election candidate if he had first been forced to answer the toughest possible criticism from his GOP primary foes. So far, that hasn’t happened.
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
