What is it with Massachusetts Liberals? In 1988 we had Michael Dukakis, who lost to the uncharismatic Papa Bush. In 2004 we had John “Genghis Khan” Kerry who didn’t even know what his stance was the net hour. He lost to Baby Bush, who wasn’t exactly the most articulate President. Now we have Mitt Romney, who changes his positions minute by minute.
George Will who is a member of the establishment breaks rank. He warns the GOP elites that Mitt Romney is their Michael Dukakis. The paralels are there. Both are Technocratic big government Progressives. Will even goes further, He says that Mitt Romney is unelectable. AN analysis I agree with.
The Republican presidential dynamic — various candidates rise and recede; Mitt Romney remains at about 25 percent support — is peculiar because conservatives correctly believe that it is important to defeat Barack Obama but unimportant that Romney be president. This is not cognitive dissonance.
[….]
Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate. Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the Tea Party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming.
Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from “data” (although there is precious little to support Romney’s idea that in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants is a powerful magnet for such immigrants) and who believes elections should be about (in Dukakis’s words) “competence,” not “ideology.” But what would President Romney competently do when not pondering ethanol subsidies that he forthrightly says should stop sometime before “forever”? Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?
Read it all: Mitt Romney, the pretzel candidate
George Will is spot on here.
Tags: george will, Michael Dukakis
