The other maw of the Beast (the first being The Wall Street Journal), Investor’s Business Daily, takes up for Mitt Romney:

Is Mitt Romney a hypocrite and panderer for his position on embryonic stem cell research? No more so than Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. And why is the Associated Press distorting the truth on the subject?

Conservatives are suspicious about Romney’s “sudden” move to the right on the subject as they continue their search for the next Ronald Reagan. But the Reagan they cherish was once a Democrat and as governor of California in 1967 Reagan signed a quite liberal abortion law, saying: “I’m fully sympathetic with attempts to liberalize the outdated abortion law now on the books in California.”

Reagan later became staunchly pro-life and backed the first pro-life plank in the Republican Party platform.

Similarly, George W. Bush ran as a pro-choice congressional candidate in 1978 but won election as a pro-life candidate for governor of Texas in 1994. His first and so far only veto was of a bill to expand federal funding of stem cell research on new embryos created and destroyed for that purpose.

The media are suspicious of Romney as well, but for a slightly different reason. They distrust him not because he has changed positions but because in their view he has chosen the wrong one.

Of course, it isn’t just his views on ESCR that have changed (which might be much more understandable, since it is a relatively new and slightly more involved subject with which many people are only passingly familiar), but his views of abortion itself, and what is more he would have us believe the implausible story that he decided–after 34 years or so of unwavering support for abortion–that it was because of a new understanding of ESCR that he came to the realisation that he should also oppose abortion.  (It wasn’t because of any of his wife’s pregnancies or the births of his sons or anything that an average person might think would have some bearing on one’s views of the question, but because of a meeting with a couple experts when he was governor in Boston.)  Better still, he wants us to believe that all this changed in the last two years or so, and that the timing of his changed view has nothing to do with his campaign.  Maybe we could give him the benefit of the doubt about one of these things, but not about all of them.  It’s just too much for a politician to ask all at once.  

It may well be that the media are hitting Romney on his flip-flopping because they dislike his new view, or it could be that it is newsworthy that a presidential candidate is blatantly opportunistic and basically dishonest about something he is trying to make into an important plank of his candidacy.  It could be both together: liberal journalists might be thrilled that they get to nail a pro-life “convert” to the wall for his double-dealing, but that doesn’t mean that the “convert” isn’t a fraud.  

It is possible that someone “evolving” in the other direction would get a lot of sympathy, would be described as having been “thoughtful” and “engaged” and “serious” and would generally be given a break each time his deception was exposed to the world–in other words, the liberal media would be doing for the newly-minted pro-choice candidate exactly what the GOP-friendly media are doing for Romney now.  Witness the IBD editorial as one example of this.  But what of the argument of the editorial itself?

The argument is that Reagan used to be pro-choice and then learned the error of his ways, and the same is said about Bush, which is supposed to give us confidence that Romney will be all right, too.  Okay, let’s assume for the moment that Romney really will be as committed a pro-lifer as these two were (whos records were, in fact, mixed or less than ideal).  This gets me to thinking.  Reagan might well have explained his change of position as a response to the excess and constitutional farce of Roe, which preceded his “conversion” on abortion by only a couple years, and Bush could presumably attribute the change to his religious awakening as an evangelical.  By the early ’90s, when the culture wars were quite intense, both Reagan and Bush had become reasonably pro-life.  Meanwhile, Romney persisted in the same position.  Pre-Roe, post-Roe, all the way through the ’90s and right on through his gubernatorial race and, by his own account, for almost two years as governor, he was solidly committed to making abortion legal and available and state-funded (at least according to his questionnaire from ’02).    

During all this time, the costs of abortion continued to mount while more and more evidence–that’s the what Romney the problem-solver is supposed to be so interested in–came in making it harder and harder to dismiss unborn children, even in the earliest stages of development, as “mere” masses of cells.  (It occurred to me not long ago that this “mass of cells” line is a strange defense of abortion, since all fully-developed living creatures are masses of cells.)  Yet it was supposedly at the moment that Romney was presented with what he regarded as a particularly callous dismissal of the ethical problems of destroying embryos that he discovered that life in the womb was not expendable.  Until that meeting, when he would have been 56 years old, he was not so terribly concerned and supposedly hadn’t given it much thought. 

Indeed, in his defense, his supporters will say that Romney had not given the question much thought before then.  Yet he had given it just enough thought to take staunch pro-choice stances.  So Romney can have it one of two ways: he is either someone who takes positions without understanding the significance and nature of what he’s supporting (which lets him off the hook for all those years of being unthinkingly pro-choice), or he is a problem-solver with good attention to detail who learns all the facts and makes his decision (which means that he familiarised himself with the subject and still came to a pro-abortion position, to which he held until it was no longer politically useful).  He is either as curious and interested in information as he claims he is–which is supposed to be one of his admirable qualities–or he gets a pass for being incurious and unreflective for most of his adult life about all questions pertaining to abortion.  He doesn’t get to have both. 

Romneyites say that they support Romney in part because he is a problem-solver who learns a great deal about the details of a subject and then makes decisions according to what he has learned, yet these same supporters seem to glory in the fact that the man was, until very recently, oblivious to the ethical implications of abortion even though he quite passionately (or so it seemed) defended abortion rights in public during two campaigns.  In other words, they are confirming that he embraced a position about which he had not given a lot of thought one way or the other because he deemed it the politically expedient thing to do back then, and now we are supposed to believe that he is being both principled and thoughtful, when his record in this particular area suggests that he has been neither.

Another way to respond to this editorial would be something like this: in the early days, when the pro-life cause was still fairly new and only just getting organised politically, it was reasonable to exhibit far greater flexibility in order to bring it to a national audience and to try to make it an important priority of public policy.  Twenty-five years later, it should not be nearly as acceptable to pro-lifers to have to settle for a candidate who is making a virtue out of the fact that he has only just now gotten to the point where the movement was 25 years ago.  It might have been acceptable, even necessary, to embrace recent converts for leadership roles twenty-five years ago, but if that is what pro-lifers are reduced to accepting today it begs two questions: has there been any significant progress in the last generation and was the previous trust placed in these other converts was as well-placed as everyone seems to think that it was?  If the answers to these questions are no, maybe it is time to acknowledge that this old strategy of embracing convert politicians as leaders has simply failed to achieve as much as might be achieved with a much more consistently committed sort of leader.  Maybe it would show that rushing to embrace someone who happens to say the right things right now at a highly advantageous moment after having been wrong for 30 years is almost certain to result in disappointment and betrayal.  It seems likely that someone who has come only recently to this new understanding will not have the right experience and perspective of someone who has been a reliable, proven defender of life for at least a decade or more. 

Romney wants us to believe that the kid who just picked up a baseball a couple of years ago is ready to be a starting pitcher in the big leagues.  He’s still not entirely clear on all of the rules, and until recently he was firmly against ever playing and regarded the sport as a bad idea, but now he’s really fired up and excited about it, so we should put him in the starting rotation right now.  What would a smart manager say to this kid?  He’d say, “Go learn the game and come back when you can play at our level.”