David Brooks thinks he is helping Romney with this advice:

He needs to stop opportunistically backtracking on his Medicare position, just to please whatever senior group he happens to be in front of. He needs to show that he is willing to pursue at least a few unpopular policies, even policies that are unfashionable in his own party. Since many people fear that he is a suck-up, it would actually help him at this point if he violated party orthodoxy in some bold and independent way.

At this point, nothing would convey greater phoniness than Romney’s sudden discovery of bedrock principles that he isn’t willing to compromise. It would be widely and correctly interpreted as yet another mask, just another iteration of the ever-changing Romney (I believe this one is version 6 or 7). It would convince very few, and it would annoy a lot more. After all, what could be more fake than for an “outer-directed person” (if that’s what Romney is) to pretend that he’s not “a pliable member of a team”? One thing that can be said for Romney is that he is definitely a team player. He doesn’t do the part of the voice crying in the wilderness, and he knows it. Everyone can see that Romney’s phoniness is a liability, but it isn’t something that can be fixed at this late stage.

Romney isn’t going to take this advice, and he’s wise not to if he doesn’t want all of his shape-shifting to have been in vain. He has carefully crafted his political persona to be the Republican consensus candidate. Republicans may not be enthusiastic about him, but most can accept him. Being “bold and independent” wouldn’t help him with doubters, because most people would conclude that it was calculated and nothing more than another kind of conformism, and his opponents would seize on it as proof that Romney would be an unacceptable nominee. If Romney took a “bold and independent” position that contradicted party orthodoxy on any important issue right now, he would face a backlash and he would have to retreat almost immediately. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Romney might break with party orthodoxy once in office, provided that it was to his advantage to do so, but doing so in the middle of the nomination contest would be a huge and unnecessary self-inflicted wound.

It would be interesting to see him try. What must a political opportunist think about unchanging political principles? As he sees them, they can quickly become shackles that limit his ability to adapt and respond to changing circumstances. He doesn’t seem them as solid foundations on which to build, but as weights that can slow him down or drag him under. If they get in his way, why wouldn’t he discard them? Imagine someone like that trying to persuade people that he cares so much about X that he would sooner be defeated than make any concessions on that issue. It would probably be painful to watch.

Brooks dispenses more advice:

He needs to step outside the cautious incrementalism that is the inevitable product of excessive polling and focus-group testing. He needs to find a policy like entitlement reform that is so important to him that he’s willing to risk losing the presidency over it [bold mine-DL]. The eternal rule of presidential politics is that a candidate has to be willing to lose everything if he’s going to win everything.

That’s a tall order for the vast majority of politicians. Very few successful presidential candidates have an issue that matters more to them than winning. If he were going to follow Brooks’ recommendations, shouldn’t Romney start with something a little less demanding than demonstrating a willingness to go down in flames for the sake of a cause? A good start for the “integrity tour” would be to stop telling so many egregious, easily-discovered lies.

Brooks mentions Santorum at the end, but Santorum is the perfect example of what Romney has worked so hard not to be for the last seven years. No one doubts that Santorum really believes what he says. No one doubts that he would keep saying the same things no matter how many voters he alienates in the process. Almost everyone understands that this is why he lost by one of the biggest margins of defeat of any incumbent Senator ever. Romney may be overly sensitive to what other people want to hear, but for a politician that is less of a flaw than Santorum’s complete obliviousness on certain issues.

Romney has received a lot of perfectly legitimate criticism for being out of touch and trapped inside a series of bubbles that cut him off from the experience of a lot of Americans, but Santorum takes a sort of perverse pride in defending wildly unpopular policies that are unpopular because they are failing. No one expected Santorum to become a vocal antiwar candidate in 2006 to stave off a defeat that was probably unavoidable, but it took unusually poor political instincts to conclude that 2006 was the year to make his re-election a referendum on the public’s concern over the Iranian-Venezuelan threat. Santorum followed Brooks’ advice that a candidate “has to be willing to lose everything if he’s going to win everything,” and he lost badly. If you’re Romney, why would that seem appealing?