Veteran newsman Dan Rather said Tuesday that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was “gambling” by shifting his proposed policies to better reflect public opinion.

“The Romney camp has obviously made the gamble that, look, we can change where we stand,” he told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. “We can make significant changes and people are either going to not notice or it’s not going to matter to them. Otherwise they wouldn’t have changed, for example, on Afghanistan. Now we’ll know the night after the election, the morning after the election whether they placed that bet correctly or not.”

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Romney had criticized Obama for setting a timeline for the withdraw of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, insisting that insurgents would merely wait it out and resume military operations once the U.S. had left. But at the final presidential debate on Monday night, Romney said he agreed with the plan to pull troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Rather said he wasn’t convinced that Romney’s changing policies would matter to voters, though he thought it was important.

“Again, does it matter? Will it matter with the election? I would like to believe it will matter. I hope that it did. I think that it will, but we can’t be assured that it will.”

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