Mitt Romney abandons his other good idea.

I LONG AGO GAVE UP trying to figure out who the “real” Mitt Romney is, but among the various claimants to that title is a guy who would like to index the minimum wage to inflation. I like this Mitt, because raising the minimum wage would provide a useful jolt of stimulus right now to the faltering recovery, and indexing it to inflation would keep us from waiting too long before we raised it again.

“The minimum wage is important to our economy,” Romney’s campaign literature said in 2002 when he ran for Massachusetts governor, “and Mitt Romney supports minimum wage increases, at least in line with inflation” (italics mine). This past January, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Romney said, “My view has been to allow the minimum wage to rise with the [Consumer Price Index] or with another index, so that it adjusts automatically over time.” Although Romney no longer seemed to contemplate minimum-wage increases in excess of the inflation rate, he still backed automatic increases tied to inflation. For Romney to maintain—over ten years!—such consistency on a topic as controversial as the minimum wage was unusual, to say the least.

It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Newt Gingrich, the Club For Growth, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page all hammered Romney for reiterating his former position, saying it would kill jobs. By March, Romney was telling CNBC’s Larry Kudlow that, when the Democratic Massachusetts legislature had tried to increase the state minimum wage, he’d vetoed it. (He didn’t mention that he’d tried to substitute a smaller increase or that his veto was subsequently overridden.) Romney also told Kudlow that “right now there’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage.”

The press interpreted this as a flip-flop, which wasn’t quite right. It was a neutering. Romney said he still believed that the minimum wage ought to be indexed. But he noted that inflation hadn’t risen very much since 2009, the last time the minimum wage had been raised (to $7.25). And since even that small inflation increase would today justify raising the minimum wage (to $7.77), Romney tweaked his indexing formula, too. He said he would adjust the minimum wage based on inflation plus “the jobs level throughout the country, unemployment rate, [and] competitive rates in other states, or, in this case, other nations.” Anyone who couldn’t use these additional variables to squelch any proposed minimum-wage increase just wasn’t trying.

In theory, the start of the general election campaign might prompt Romney to tweak his formula yet again, so that it justifies a minimum-wage increase after all. Polls show voters typically favor raising the minimum wage. But the right remains suspicious of Romney, and, as long as that’s true, he’s unlikely to defy them on such a high-profile issue. (Just look at his squirming over immigration, even though polls show majorities support President Obama’s position.)