Romney tacking to the right

Opinion: July 16, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

At a recent gathering of financial supporters, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney made clear he won’t ease his hard-line position on immigration and other issues for the general election. “I am not going to be a flip-flopper,” he said.

Scarcely two weeks later, however, he switched his campaign’s stance on the central financing mechanism of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, joining conservative critics in calling it a tax, rather than a mandate as a campaign spokesman had stressed just days earlier.

The two incidents appear to indicate an inconsistency on Romney’s part. But in fact, they are consistent with his continuing effort to woo conservatives who have been cool to his candidacy.

Indeed, his comment on taxes came just hours after The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page warned in sharp language that Romney’s campaign was jeopardizing his chances by suggesting it might moderate some primary positions.

A right race

Romney’s tax statement seemed designed to signal that, despite such concerns, he doesn’t plan to follow the traditional political instinct of potential nominees to adjust some ideological primary positions and move to the center but will run his general election to the right, just as he ran his primary effort.

In turn, that seems to reflect a belief among his strategists that, in today’s highly polarized electorate, there will be enough voters to elect Romney among conservatives and others disillusioned by Obama’s handling of the economy.

That raises two more basic questions, one short-term and political and the other long-term and substantive. They are whether that calculation is correct, since it could discourage the support of some independents looking for signs of moderation and what such a campaign stance bodes for a President Romney.

After all, most presidents stick pretty closely to the main positions they advocate as candidates, despite the attention given to their occasional changes. Obama promised his major priorities would include reviving the economy, ensuring universal health coverage (though he rejected a mandate during the campaign) and increasing regulation of the financial industry. President George W. Bush promised to push major tax cuts and pick conservative Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

And there seems little doubt that a President Romney’s top goals would be repeal of the Obama health plan and an economic program along the lines of the one pushed the past two years by House Republicans, extending and perhaps expanding the Bush tax cuts, giving additional tax breaks to business, cutting domestic spending and trimming federal regulation of business.

But less certain is whether that sort of campaign agenda will help Romney expand his November support beyond the Republican base that polls show is solidly in his corner, despite the criticism by the Journal’s editorial page and publishers like Rupert Murdoch and William Kristol.

Current polls show that voters who don’t firmly support either Obama or Romney are pretty evenly divided. But surveys focusing on some oftheir attitudes suggest Obama has a reasonable chance of attracting enough of them to win re-election.

Move on

For example, while the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the Obama health law doesn’t seem to have made it any more popular, a post-decision poll showed a majority of those sampled by the KaiserFamily Foundation — including a majority of independents — wanted critics to drop their repeal efforts and move on to other issues.

It also showed only two in five favored the GOP position that Congress should “repeal and replace” the law.

And a new National Journal poll Tuesday showed more Americans support Obama’s position of delaying extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers and confining them to families earning under $250,000 annually than favor the GOP/Romney stance of extending them all.

Obama clearly hopes he can peel off enough independents to win by capitalizing on these attitudes and the diminishing signs that Romney retains the moderate instincts he displayed in his earlier political forays.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.