Romney might once again be battling the charge that he doesn’t stand for anything. Mitt's moderate muddle

For the third time in a week, Mitt Romney has taken a prominent U-turn on something that’s supposed to be a matter of fundamental principles. This time, he tacked back to the center on abortion — risking reviving the original and potentially most damaging rap against Romney: He stands for nothing.

He first tested how far he can stray from party orthodoxy on taxes and health care by dangling the promise of being able to beat President Barack Obama. Then, on Tuesday, Romney told The Des Moines Register that “there’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.”


At a time when Romney’s family is urging his campaign to “ let Mitt be Mitt,” the rush of recent reversals suggests that moderate Mitt is the one he’s most comfortable with — as conservatives long feared — a problem for a candidate who spent a year and a half taking hard-line stances he needed to win the Republican nomination.

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So far, at least, conservatives don’t seem to care. Just as they cheered his debate performance, they’re happy now because he’s looking more like he can win. But the recent shifts raise the danger that Romney will once again be battling the charge that he doesn’t stand for anything.

Already, the Obama campaign is resurrecting the attack — largely abandoned earlier this year — that Romney lacks a core.

They’ve had ample material to work with this past week.

First, there was Romney’s tax plan. He explained at the debate that the deduction he favored ranged from “make up a number” to following “Bowles-Simpson as a model and take deduction by deduction and make differences that way.” The day before, he’d suggested capping deductions at $17,000 — a proposal that would hit the wealthy. That apparently wasn’t the plan either, according to aides who rushed to point out that this would go along with a movable personal exemption.

Then there was Romney’s defense of his health plan. He argued that he would cover pre-existing conditions and let people younger than 26 stay on their parents’ insurance — ideas that his senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom immediately shot down in the post-debate spin room, explaining that the plan would actually leave the market-shaping decision up to the states.

Romney also made the insurance claim last month on “Meet the Press,” with The Wall Street Journal editorial board responding that he was demonstrating that his “pre-existing political calculation seems to be that he can win the election without having to explain the economic moment or even his own policies.”

He took to the microphone himself for a quickly convened press conference to explain that he stood by his comments about the 47 percent, leaving staff and surrogates to soften and couch his point — until the night after the debate, when he took it all back and said he was wrong.



Romney’s history on abortion is much longer and more complicated. Though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is unwavering in its opposition to abortion rights and Romney was an official in its ranks, he defended Roe v. Wade while running against Ted Kennedy in 1994 and called himself “devoted and dedicated” to preserving abortion rights while running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002. He cited an epiphany in office for his decision to switch positions before his 2008 run for president and vetoed emergency contraception funding toward the end of his time in the statehouse.

Romney has previously put abortion-related legislation on his agenda in the campaign, pledging in a letter to LifeNews in July that he’d support “fetal pain” legislation, which bans abortion after 20 weeks. He also said he would end funding for Planned Parenthood and back the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits most federal funds for abortions. And he’d appoint only anti-abortion judges, with the intention of overturning the “misguided ruling” in Roe v. Wade, which he called “bad law and bad medicine.”

That’s where Romney seemed like he’d landed on the issue — until Tuesday, when he made his new comments to the Register. He took care to point out that he would sign an executive order — which isn’t technically legislation — reinstating the ban on American money being used to fund abortions overseas.

The Romney campaign immediately went into damage control mode. Very quickly, his campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul told the National Review Online that “Romney would of course support legislation aimed at providing greater protections for life.” Then she sent a different statement to CNN, declaring the candidate “proudly pro-life, and he will be a pro-life president.”

On Wednesday, Saul told POLITICO she disagrees with the premise that there’s been any change in Romney’s positions in the past week, and repeated that the Republican nominee is “proudly pro-life, and he will be a pro-life president.”

Romney said the same himself in Ohio on Wednesday when asked whether he’d oppose legislation restricting abortion rights if it came before him as president.

“I think I’ve said time and again. I’m a pro-life candidate. I’ll be a pro-life president. The actions I’ll take immediately are to remove funding for Planned Parenthood. It will not be part of my budget. And also I’ve indicated I’ll reverse the Mexico City position of the president,” Romney told a pool reporter, referring to the shorthand for the executive order banning American money from being used to pay for abortions overseas. “I will reinstate the Mexico City policy.”

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan took time from his debate preparation in St. Petersburg, Fla., to tell reporters that he isn’t disappointed by Romney’s comments, and he feels his strongly anti-abortion position is “unified” with Romney’s.

“No positions have changed; our position is very consistent,” Ryan said.

Still, conservatives are closing ranks behind the man who suddenly seems like he might have a shot at beating Obama. Among them is Gresham Barrett, the former South Carolina congressman who backed the more conservative Rick Santorum in the primaries. Barrett considers himself born-again and saved, and he believes that Romney’s had an authentic transformation of his own that holds true, no matter what he told the Register. Despite that interview and the week’s other tacks center, Barrett’s feeling is “no concern.”

“I don’t care what he said in the past; when he says, ‘I’m a changed man, I am pro-life, I believe in the rights of the unborn,’ I know what it’s like, and I believe him,” Barrett said.

Likewise, anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said she isn’t shaken — as long as Romney sticks to the position he took at the start of his 2012 run.

“We have full confidence that as president, Gov. Romney will stand by the pro-life commitments he laid out in National Review in June 2011, including his pledge to prohibit federal funding for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that perform and promote abortion, as well as advocate for a bill to protect unborn children capable of feeling pain,” she said.

The Obama campaign’s reaction, like the president’s entire approach coming out of the debate, is to try to pin this all on a “Who’s the real Romney?” attack.

Nothing either campaign did over the past year to try to portray him as a committed — or as Romney himself put it, “severely” — conservative has shaken voters from the sense that he’s really still a moderate, and Romney kept the race a dead-heat throughout. He got no real bounce at any point in the 2012 race until he started shooting through the conservative positions he’s taken on issues, beginning on stage last week in Denver.

“He’s cynically and dishonestly hiding his real position,” Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said Wednesday in a campaign conference call about the abortion comments, joined by Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “Women simply cannot trust Mitt Romney.”

This spring, the campaign debated whether to portray Romney as having no core, or a bad core. Former President Bill Clinton successfully argued that the campaign drop the no core line and focus on casting Romney as a scary conservative. That marked the beginning of Clinton’s path back to guru-savior of the Obama campaign, and there’s still some hesitance to go the flip-flopper route.

Campaigning for Obama in Nevada on Tuesday, Clinton pressed the revised point, in support of the approach the reelection campaign is now taking.

Watching the debate, Clinton said, his reaction was: “Wow — here’s old moderate Mitt. Where have you been, boy? I missed you all these last few years.”

But, Clinton went on, “The problem with this deal is the deal was made by severe conservative Mitt. That was how he described himself for two whole years,” attributing the change in positions to a consultant-driven calculation that amounted to Romney getting on stage and saying of his tax plan revisions, “You going to believe me or your lying eyes here?”

That’s the kind of offense that Democrats spooked from the debate and the apparent shift in momentum in Romney’s favor want out of the campaign.

Chris Redfern, the Ohio Democratic Party chairman, said he has a simple greeting for Romney as he appeared in the state Wednesday after adding abortion to the list of issues that he’s now expressing more ambiguity about.

“If you purposefully misstate the truth in Toledo, Ohio, I call you a liar,” Redfern said.

“It is a week of lying. I’m a Catholic. I’d spend more time in confession than on the campaign trail if I was Mitt Romney,” Redfern said, adding that he’s looking forward to Vice President Joe Biden and the president going hard at these latest statements in their upcoming debates. “You’re running against a guy who will change his positions like a political chameleon from season to season. Now it’s from day to day.”

Juana Summers in St. Petersburg, Fla., contributed to this report.