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.

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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.