Because I’ve got friends and aquaintances either working for or supporting in some way nearly every presidential candidate in the race on the Republican side, I’m trying desperately to remain open-minded about each one. Out of respect and courtesy, I have decided to give every candidate the benefit of the doubt (well, maybe not Hagel) and not totally written off anybody at this point. That being said, this attitude is easier to maintain with some candidates than others.
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Consider Mitt Romney. Try as I may, I just can’t get enthusiasm going for him. While I know several good conservatives that are in his camp, and some of the contributors to my favorite magazine (National Review) are too, he holds no appeal for me. While I know he’s been talking a good game on many conservative themes and issues, I just feel uneasy about the Romney candidacy.
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For starters, he just strikes me wrong every time I see him. He comes off as too smooth and too cool, in a way that just appears contrived. Some might call it confidence, but there’s confident and then there’s cockiness. Beyond that, with all of the videotaped and otherwise well-documented evidence showing radically different positions taken by Romney through the years, it makes it easy for the moniker "flip-flopper" to stick. While I can appreciate a "road to Damascus" moment, such change can be problematic in the hands of the opposition in the general election.
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Especially hard for me is the now-famous YouTube video of Mitt during the 1994 Senate campaign, in which he vehemently denies Reagan years, vowing never to support a return to those days.
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BOSTON –To hear Mitt Romney talk on the campaign trail, you might think the Republican presidential candidate had a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck."I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I’ve been a hunter pretty much all my life," he said this week in Keene, N.H., to a man sporting a National Rifle Association cap.
Yet the former Massachusetts governor’s hunting experience is limited to two trips at the bookends of his 60 years: as a 15-year-old, when he hunted rabbits with his cousins on a ranch in Idaho, and last year, when he shot quail on a fenced game preserve in Georgia..Last year’s trip was an outing with major donors to the Republican Governors Association, which Romney headed at the time..An aide said Wednesday that Romney was not trying to mislead anyone, although he confirmed Romney had been hunting only on those occasions in his life.."Gov. Romney’s support for the Second Amendment doesn’t come from the fact he knows how to handle a firearm; it comes from his appreciation of the Constitution and the rights enshrined in it, including the right to keep and bear arms," said campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom.
Then why didn’t Romney simply say so? How can he make such easily fact-checked incorrect or misleading statements and think he can get away with it? Shouldn’t he know better? Or is it that his desire to pander to particular voters wins the race against truth in any given situation? I want to beat the Democrats in ’08. Our Nation’s survival depends on it. We can’t be messing around with someone who might fall apart in the general election campaign.
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(Prior post about Mitt & guns here.)