IN THE early days of Mormonism, the pioneer evangelists of the young faith saw considerable successes arguing the absurdity of the idea that for millenia God used prophet after prophet to make plain his will to man and then, suddenly, became mute, abandoning his favoured creatures to tease out with our meagre minds the meanings of the old prophecies and their application to present circumstances. That there is another scripture, that prophets roam among us still, should surprise only those ready to accept the outrageous notion that a once demanding and garrulous God has retreated from his children in silence, having nothing more to say. The idea of an ongoing prophetic relationship to God has not only proven an effective selling point for proselytising Mormons, it has built into Mormonism a potent adaptive flexibility. In the face of potentially ruinous religious persecution from Congress, church president (and putative prophet) Wilford Woodruff in 1890 disavowed plural marriage in "The Manifesto", which has been canonised and is believed by mainstream Mormons to reflect divine revelation. In 1978, after decades of pressure from the civil-rights movement, and facing the problem of expanding the church's membership in countries with large mixed-race populations, church president (and putative prophet) Spencer W. Kimball announced a revelation making blacks eligible for the Mormon priesthood. Yesterday, Eric Fehrnstrom, a Mitt Romney adviser, compared the ease of the classic post-primary pivot toward the centre to the act of refreshing an Etch A Sketch:

Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It's almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.

Since it is widely agreed that Mitt Romney's lability is his greatest liability, this was a stupid way for Mr Fehrnstrom to make his totally conventional point. When Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum began to seize on the opportunity to wave Etch-A-Sketches at campaign stops in order to emphasise the impermanence of Mr Romney's conservative principles, my mind turned to the doctrinal flexibility of Mr Romney's religion of ongoing revelation and its evident advantages. Politicians, like religions or political ideologies, either adapt or fail. Mr Gingrich supported the individual health-insurance mandate before he opposed it. Mr Santorum championed "No Child Left Behind" when his party was for it, but he's sorry about it now that the party has changed its tune.

A successful politician, like a religion of living revelation, is a palimpsest upon which shifting opinion is written and rewritten. Mr Fehnstrom's mistake was so breezily to admit that the medium is not blood, that the constantly reworked surface is not stone. Mr Romney is especially dogged by his reversals in part because they are larger and more numerous than his opponents'. The vast distance between the median Massachusetts voter and the median American Republican primary voter made Mr Romney's 2008 attempt to impersonate a dogmatic conservative seem especially brazen and false. He's grown into the role, though, and he might have more easily coasted to victory this year had Barack Obama not queered his crowning policy achievement by replicating it. This has required more than a little agile revision from Mr Romney's camp. What I find surprising, what I think many find objectionable, is how Mr Romney seems always a little pleased to have shaken the Etch-A-Sketch and drawn a more expedient picture—how denying that it is a new picture, rather than a more complete picture, seems to bring a spirited little glimmer to his eyes.

I don't believe Mr Romney is really less principled than his opponents. Because they've all succeeded in politics, we know they've all moved freely in the ample space between their few truly fixed principles. The real difference may be that Mr Romney is more easy with the idea of a dogma that adapts, more alert to the living message of the daily polls.

(Photo credit: AFP)