For a Byzantine angle on Huckabee’s remark about Mormon beliefs (“Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”), I would note that the belief in the fraternity of Jesus and the devil has some loose similarities with the beliefs ascribed to the Bogomils, who allegedly taught something similar about Satan and Michael.  Aside from these associations, there is a more fundamental problem that this belief contradicts the understanding of Christ as the only-begotten (monogenes) Son, co-unoriginate with the Father.     

Update: In the “Huckabee is not running a sectarian campaign” file, you can add his apology to Romney for these entirely innocent remarks.

Where has Fred Siegel been living these past few years?  He writes:

Who could be more authentically representative of Rove-era Republicanism than Mike Huckabee, a pioneer-stock evangelical Baptist who wants to reclaim Americans for Christ?

As it happens, I think Huckabee does represent many elements of Bushism, of which his evangelical Christianity is in some ways the least important element (as it was the least important in the actual content of Bushism), but “Rove-era Republicanism” had no interest in reclaiming anything for Christ.  “Rove-era Republicanism” was the ultimate expression of the GOP’s habit of exploiting social conservatives for electoral support and then largely ignoring everything they wanted once in power.  As a big-government and “compassionate” conservative, Huckabee would be Bush’s heir, at least in domestic policy, and he has all the instincts of Gerson’s activist do-gooding vision of conservatism (i.e., Gerson’s non-conservative agenda). 

As Ross points out, however, this has absolutely nothing to do with the lessons of the 2006 elections.  In my view, the lessons of 2006 should make the Republicans want to rally behind their lone antiwar candidate, but somehow I don’t think most Republicans would agree with that, either.  More on this in a moment.  If you accept the criticism of Huckabee that he is clueless on foreign policy (and I have mostly been persuaded that he is), which his embrace of Friedman and Gaffney does nothing to refute, then in a very narrow way you can say that Huckabee’s ineptitude on foreign policy will be rejected by voters much as the administration’s was last year.  That is presumably not the message that Fred Siegel wants to send. 

Returning to an older post by Ross on the GOP field, and touching on Noah’s response, I think all of us, myself included, have been framing things in slightly misleading way.  Ross and I look at the field and see candidates who have irreconcilable differences with key constituencies, while Noah sees a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.  Ross and I will often describe these differences in “ideological” terms, but they are really differences over practical policy and the party’s self-definition.  What I think we have all been missing is that the party is trying to convince itself that it is the same Republican Party of the ’80s and ’90s and has a desperate need to reaffirm the traditional definitions of the pre-Bush GOP, according to which almost all members of the modern party are disqualified.  That is why there has been so much weepy Reagan nostalgia and why the Fred Thompson boomlet happened at all.  Many Republicans at some level know the last seven years have been a disaster for them and for the country, but the reasons they give for the disaster are entirely different from what many of us would give.  The explanation has become, as conservatives have become used to saying, that it was insufficient dedication to principles that led to policy failure and electoral defeat.  In one sense, I think this analysis is correct, but really it gets things as wrong as possible, because it is always framed in terms of “runaway spending” and corruption.  In my view, the Iraq war has been a failure and a disaster because of a departure from conservative wisdom and prudence, and it has been Iraq that brought about the GOP’s downfall, but these are not the principles that most Republicans think they have violated.  Incredibly, they believe that the public rejected them because of deficit spending and earmarks.  (Granted, massive spending and earmarks didn’t help their cause, but they were not the main cause of public discontent.)  Blind to their largest weakness of all, most of the GOP field has been striving to adhere to the traditional definitions, which has required them to engage in so many ridiculous contortions.  

Then you realise that the reason why GOP candidates have so much trouble declaring themselves to be the defenders of small government and social conservative values at the same time is that many of the GOP’s elected officials around the country have never been able to embrace both of these things, underscoring the social conservatives’ far greater importance to the coalition as a matter of electoal politics.  Initially, and I think mistakenly, the idea was that national security would trump all other questions, so it followed that the anointed “national security conservatives” would dominate the race, namely McCain and Giuliani.  What the supporters of these candidates missed is that hard-line, aggressive foreign policy has so completely taken over the majority of the GOP’s politicians and pundits that all of the other candidates could mouth the appropriately bellicose and confrontational phrases and undermine the rationale for the candidacies of McCain and Giuliani.  In a somewhat hilarious reversal of fortunes, it is now anti-jihadism and hegemonism that receive the lip service and social and cultural conservatism that take center stage.  The GOP has reached a consensus on national security and foreign policy, which is now taken as something of a given.  Obviously, I think the consensus they have reached is terrible, but it is there.  It is excellent that Ron Paul struggles against that consensus, which is horrible and needs to be overturned, but one reason I think he has such high unfavourables among Republicans in poll after poll is that he is repudiating something that the majority of the party now regards as fundamental. 

Because it has become fundamental for the GOP, it is no longer the province of the fanatical proponents of aggressive foreign policy.  It has entered into the party’s bloodstream.  I think it will kill the party, but the majority thinks that it is life-giving and essential.  Once the assumptions of neoconservatism become a new norm, which, despite everything that has happened, appears to be taking place, the most outspoken candidates who have become associated with neoconservatism lose their edge.  If you can take for granted that almost everyone in the field supports some form of interventionism, other issues can come to the fore and dominate the debate.  Thus foreign policy weakness becomes a kind of strength, since it compels the candidates who are weakest on that issue to cling all the more strongly to the new consensus and thus avoid any direct or sharp conflicts with the people who defend the consensus.  Huckabee may have said reasonable things about Iran policy, but given enough time I’m sure he can be talked out it, just as Bush was turned away from “realism” towards the current course.     

If you can have Huckabee, who is a genuine social conservative and who takes his foreign policy cues from Frank Gaffney, you hardly need Giuliani with all of his baggage and the danger that he will alienate social conservatives.  Romney’s problem is that he can nail down the economic conservatives on taxes and trade, but primarily economic conservatives aren’t very numerous and have their greatest influence in the conservative media and think tanks, while he has difficulty persuasing social conservatives that he has joined them.  However, both can effectively neutralise the main rationale of Giuliani’s candidacy by shouting about the dangers of “Islamofascism” and “the caliphate,” which is roughly how sophisticated Giuliani’s foreign policy vision is to start with.  

Huckabee’s campaign is shaping up to be an anti-elite campaign not simply because he uses economic populist rhetoric, but because he represents the broad base of the party in social conservatives and the middle-class and he clashes with the movement and party establishments over their deference to corporate interests.  With his new, utterly cynical and absurd flip-flop on immigration, his opposition to those interests now appears complete (though he has recently said positive things about NAFTA that make his gestures towards protectionism seem much emptier than I had thought they were).  It may be that the forces Huckabee is trying to use to propel his campaign are akin to what Sam Francis discussed in his writings on the Middle American Radicals, but it is extremely doubtful that Huckabee has any intention of governing in the interests of the MARs.  Nonetheless, it is the danger that this is what Huckabee represents that has the establishment terrified.  It is the much greater likelihood that he represents another iteration of Bush that makes me dread a Huckabee nomination.   

Noah wrote:

So, basically, I don’t expect a brokered convention, and I don’t expect a long, drawn-out struggle for a nominee, and I don’t expect a nominee that has espoused any meaningful heterodoxies. Maybe that’s why this contest has been so maddening: because it could be about something, but the major candidates are determined to see that it isn’t, and yet this contest about nothing still has an uncertain outcome.

But, as usual, the contest really is over who can best patch up the broken, bleeding body of the GOP coalition and get into fighting condition for the next election.  The thing that Noah finds frustrating is that all of the candidates, save Ron Paul, have come up with essentially the same answer to how to fix the coalition–by pretending there’s basically nothing wrong with it and by pretending that they are all perfectly good representatives of most of its constituent members.  We all know this isn’t true, so the play-acting seems frustratingly pointless.  The failure in ’06, as all of the other candidates would have you believe, was the result of deviating from the old script of fiscal responsibility and controlling the growth of government, but these were the least of the GOP’s problems.  These are the kinds of things that bother deficit hawks and Ron Paul supporters, which is obviously not what most Republicans are, to say nothing of most Americans.  Since most of the candidates are judging the party’s failures according to the old script (Romney’s three-legged stool of social-fiscal-national security conservatism is a good example of this), voters have also started judging the candidates by that script and necessarily found them all badly wanting.  Republican voters tried to have someone who was “solid” on just some of the issues (i.e., Bush), and they found that they didn’t like a lot of the things where he wasn’t very “solid.”  The trouble with all of this is that the GOP really has become a Bushist party, as Ross correctly argued earlier this year, and the old ’90s-era script has little or no bearing on the coalition politics of the modern party. 

Obviously, the increased importance of immigration as a major issue also introduces a fissure into the nominating contest that wasn’t nearly so significant in the past.  Many GOP pols have to play catch-up and have to change their positions on this because the issue has become a burning one for Republican voters, while it had been something that the party leaders could effectively ignore in the past.  Those who were elected in the ’90s and early ’00s were liable to have awful records on this issue because there was no strong incentive to be sound (i.e., pro-enforcement and restrictionist) on it, but now these same pols have to respond to the backlash against “comprehensive” reform.  Had the “comprehensive” reform crowd left well enough alone, it is questionable whether Huckabee, Romney, Giuliani and even McCain would have to be bending over backwards to pretend that they care about border security and enforcement of immigration laws. 

There has been an assumption that a post-Bush era would entail a change in the balance of political power within the coalition.  Attempts to pin the failure of ’06 on one part of the coalition or the other (where the prime culprits are, implausibly, the social conservatives, or, much more credibly, the “national security” conservatives) are efforts to shape the future coalition.  Socially liberal Republicans have wanted to pin the blame for ’06 on social conservatives even before the votes were counted, not because the social conservatives contributed to GOP defeat (they had essentially nothing to do with it) but because the defeat was an opportunity to clear out the kinds of people the “libertarians” and Giuliani-supporting secular conservatives didn’t care for.  In the end, Huckabee probably won’t be nominated, despite this early surge, and even if he were American voters might not go for Huckabee.  But if they don’t it will be because his policy proposals are an incoherent mish-mash, his history of pardoning heinous criminals will make them question his judgement and his smiley preacher spiel will ultimately irritate them rather than charm them.  It will not be because he talked about taking back America for Christ.         

Cross-posted at The American Scene

Sullivan is right when he says about Huckabee:

What matters is cultural and religious identity, rather than policy.

I say this frequently, but this response to candidates still drives me crazy from time to time.  In fact, I argued the same thing when I talking about the risks of describing Obama in terms of his familiarity and connections to other nations and religions:

“Vote for Obama–he’s not like you in so very many ways” is not a winning slogan in a mass democracy.  Identitarianism is one aspect of democracy that is one of its most deplorable features and one of its most basic and unavoidable.  Being able to identify with a candidate is essential, and anything that weakens this hurts the candidate.   

This is how it works all the time.  Somehow it still surprises me when it happens.  I don’t agree that it is a product of “sectarianization” of politics, since I think identitarianism is part and parcel of mass democracy.  Even so, despite understanding this, I continue to be amazed at the ludicrous forms identitarianism takes.

This is a pretty memorable section from Zev Chafets’ profile of Huckabee:

The price of oil took us to foreign affairs, which Huckabee knows is not his strong suit. He quoted Pat Buchanan’s crack from the 1992 presidential campaign that Bill Clinton’s foreign-policy experience came from eating at the International House of Pancakes. But Clinton circa 1992 — who had worked briefly for Senator William Fulbright and studied the ways of the world at Georgetown, Yale and Oxford — was Prince Metternich compared with Huckabee.

Then the horror washes over you when you read this:

At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy.

Insipid and dangerous!  What a combination!

This history is directly relevant to modern debates. In some conservative quarters we are seeing the return of Burkeanism — or at least a narrow version of it. These supposed Burkeans dismiss the promotion of democracy and human rights as “ideological,” the protection of human life and dignity as “theological,” and compassionate conservatism as a modern heresy. 

But the compassionate conservatism of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury is just as old as Burke, and more suited to an American setting. American conservatives, after all, are called upon to conserve a liberal ideal — that all men are created equal. A conservatism that does not accommodate the “ideology” of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. will seem foreign to most Americans. A concern for the rights of the poor and vulnerable is not simply “theological”; it is a measure of our humanity. And skepticism in this noble cause is not sophistication; it seems more like exhaustion and cynicism. ~Michael Gerson

But neo-Jacobinism, which is what Gerson is implicitly defending, is ideological in the worst way.  The promotion of “democracy and human rights” that relies on coercion and interference in the affairs of other nations is not simply ideologically driven, but divorced from basic precepts of justice.  One marvels at Gerson’s claim to represent the cause that supports the “protection of human life and dignity,” when it was he who lent his pen and his words to the unleashing of a living hell upon the people of Iraq.  The insight of Burke was not simply that change must be gradual and in keeping with the customs of a people, but that revolutionary change, change wrought by violence, the very kind of change Gerson has himself promoted, is inherently desructive of social order, morality and the welfare of the people in whose name it is being done.  Burkeans are as concerned with the practical means for pursuing the Good as they are with the high-minded intention to do good. 

Why Wilberforce and Shaftesbury are more suited to an American setting, Gerson never explains, but just asserts.  Conservatives are actually called on to conserve a constitutional tradition and a system of ordered liberty; you could fill a small room with the books and treatises that explain why conservatives, yes, American conservatives, are not dedicated to preserving the idea contained in that most infelicitous of phrases.  What is striking about this article is how Gerson wraps up the actual practice of “compassionate conservatism” of the last six years in the legacy of men such as Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, as if what the “compassionate conservatives” have done in government can be compared with the kinds of work they did.  The thinking seems to be: they valued human dignity and we, the compassionate conservatives, also claim to value human dignity, so they must be our forerunners, and we can appropriate their achievements for our cause.  Shaftesbury combated the exploitation of child labour and the inhumane treatment of the insane.  “Compassionate conservatism” in practice has meant zealous support for the importation of cheap, exploited labour and an apparent indifference to the human trafficking that goes on across our borders.–in the name of Christian charity and brotherhood no less!  Wilberforce worked tirelessly to turn the power of the British state against the slave trade, which led to the employment of the British Navy in eliminating this trade.  “Compassionate conservatism” in practice has meant aggressive warfare, the ruination of whole nations and the displacement of millions of people from their homes.  Because Wilberforce and Shaftesbury actually acted compassionately, Gerson believes he can tie “compassionate conservatism” to their legacy, yet where they were gradualists and men who respected laws of man and God “compassionate conservatives” have been radicals with a rather more mixed record.

Since Alex Massie has asked, I thought I would offer my thoughts on his latest Scotland-related post.

Mr. Massie writes:

Still, it’s more interesting that O’Hagan links the modern independence cause with the Confederacy. This isn’t quite as odd as it might seem at first blush (though I’d also suggest that if it is impossible to leave a Union then that Union is, ipso facto, to some degree coercive rather than voluntary).

Quite right.  To digress for a moment, I said in recent weeks something to the effect that Lincoln could not have saved the Union, since the response to withdrawal from the Union marked the end of the Union as a voluntary confederation of states.  The name union itself implies a joining together of disparate and discrete elements, and it is in the nature of such a union that there can also be a dissolution.  In this sense, it is misleading to refer to the U.S. forces in the War of Secession as Unionists.  They represented, in their effects if not always in their intentions, consolidation.  It seems to me that one can praise or condemn the work of consolidation, but one cannot deny that it was something very different from the arrangement that had prevailed earlier, and that consolidation was in no way consistent with the federal principle of the Union. 

That brings me back to Mr. O’Hagan.  Likening the pursuit of Scottish independence to the cause of the Confederacy is an attempt to shame supporters of independence by playing on conventional hostility to the cause of the CSA.  Above all, it is an attempt to confuse the issue.  O’Hagan also frames it in a very strange way when he says, “It seems as lunatic to me as the argument of Southern Confederates in  America, who feel they were betrayed by Abraham Lincoln.”  I suppose it depends on the moment in time to which O’Hagan is referring.  If he is referring to the election of 1860, that might be one thing.  If he is referring to the spring and summer of 1861, that is something else.  Southern Confederates did not “feel” they were betrayed by Abraham Lincoln, but were targeted for suppression by military force.  Whatever else you will say about it, this is very different from what is going on in Europe today. 

There is, I take it from Mr. Massie’s post, a drive to have people in the United Kingdom call themselves British.  This reminds me of an anecdote.  It was 1999, and I was flying to London.  I was going to begin a six-week summer session at St. Anne’s College in Oxford once I arrived, and on the plane I was sitting next to a woman, a factory worker (as I recall) from the Kentish town of Deal.  For whatever reason, U.K. politics became the topic of conversation, and the woman expressed to me her loathing for Tony Blair.  Naturally, I felt the same.  What was the thing she made a point of criticising?  She hated that he referred to the country as Britain and to the people as “British.”  She was, she told me in no uncertain terms, English, not British.  This was very important to her. 

Now you might say that she was representative of the relatively recent surge in English nationalist feeling that accompanied devolution, but the point is that the idea of Britishness is not one that is necessarily widely shared by the people on either side of the border.  “British” is, as it has been for three hundred years, a designation of a political identity.  Unlike the name American, which has tended to supersede identification with one’s home state in the 20th and 21st centuries, it is my impression that people in the U.K. will just as often describe themselves primarily in terms of being English, Scottish, Irish or, God bless them, Welsh.  Perhaps it is because the name is relatively that much newer and to some extent seems more artificial than the names of the several places, and perhaps it is because these places have had their own political histories apart from that of England, with whose history they have become intertwined.  In other words, there is a memory–even if it is sometimes a romanticised or exaggerated memory–of being something other than British.  Aside from the few years of attempted independence, Southrons have been Americans, which sharply distinguishes the cases.

Mr. Massie notes:

It’s certainly the case, if I may generalise, that American conservatives tend to be more interested in Scotland than liberals. I should have ceased to be surprised by the number of Americans (and other foreigners) who say they are waiting for Scottish independence. Many, perhaps most, of these sympathisers are conservatives.

In part this may reflect the settlement patterns of Scots in the Carolinas and Appalachia which these days ensures that those most likely to appreciate their Scottish heritage are also, on balance, more likely to be conservatives than liberals. But it’s also the case that the idea of Scotland has a cultural resonance in the south – or amongst some conservatives – that it lacks in New England.     

There really is a lot to this.  Though you would not know it from my Norse-sounding surname, I have a Scots-Irish background through my mother’s father’s family.  Perhaps in the same way that diasporans and American ethnics often seem more invested in nationalist myths than the people who live in the home country, I was raised with a keen appreciation for the difference of the Irish and Scots from the English (even though a large part of my heritage on my father’s side was English) and for whatever reason I sympathised from an early age with Irish and Scottish independence, whether achieved in the past or hoped for in the future.  Like many other Scots-Irish, my grandfather’s people had settled in Appalachia (in what was Virginia and would become West Virginia).  The story I heard when I was younger was that our original ancestor from Ulster had come over with the British army as part of the effort to suppress the rebellion of the colonies and then, as you might expect in such a story, switched sides.  The story is almost certainly made up, but it reflected the romantic notion that had been kept alive in my grandfather’s family that they, the Scots-Irish, were deeply opposed to the British just as the patriots here were.  So part of the attachment to the cause of Scotland, so to speak, is the attachment of descendants of Scots-Irish settlers (many of whom, like one of my ancestors, fought on the side of the Confederacy) to one of the old countries, but it is also a sense of common cause between Americans and Scots in overthrowing or resisting British rule.  To the extent that conservatives romanticise the War for Independence more than liberals, they are also inclined to sympathise with other causes that are seen to be anti-British (some conservatives’ rather undue affection for Winston Churchill and the Empire notwithstanding).  This is one reason why, no doubt much to Mr. Massie’s annoyance, American conservatives in particular take such satisfaction in the anti-British films of Mel Gibson and will tend to invest Braveheart with far more importance than it should have. 

Mr. Massie continues:

In other words, the Jacobite cause is reactionary in the best sense of the term (and proudly so: I have one American friend whose personal email address begins, jacobite1688). To some extent this remains the case. The atavistic nationalism O’Hagan discovers is far removed from the sober calculation of the national interest favoured by the SNP’s smart-suited Young Turks in Edinburgh. Yet the latter requires the former, even if the former cannot prevail absent the latter.

I agree, and I am one of those reactionaries who sympathises with the Jacobites.  This may be part of the explanation why some American conservatives find Scotland so intriguing and meaningful.  It is partly that it parallels our own independence struggle, which in turn sympathisers with the Confederacy see as the precedent for the Confederates’ war for independence, but it is also that Jacobitism represents the defense of legitimacy, king and country against, if you will, the demands of a political doctrine, which is very attractive to those of us who think of conservatism as the antithesis of ideology.

What changed was I’m running for president. ~Mike Huckabee, on the latest of his flip-flops (in this case, on the Cuba embargo)

Here Romney boasts about the positive nature of his weak anti-Huckabee attack ad.  I’m sorry, but when you’re running against someone who has stratospheric favourability ratings you really have to do more than draw “contrasts” in a good-natured way while emphasising just how wonderful your opponent is on other issues.  Immigration activists seem to be gravitating towards Huckabee despite his record, which some of them must know about already, and they are doing so in surprisingly large numbers.  When your opponent is receiving the endorsement of the Minutemen, you cannot effectively get to his right on immigration.  You have already lost that battle.  Fiscal conservatism and tax policy are Romney’s strengths with Iowa voters, but these are not the kinds of issues that drive large numbers of caucus-goers.

National Review‘s endorsement of Romney is not all that surprising.  It seems to me that they have come to the conclusion you would expect, given that they, like many others, mistake Romney for someone who is “conservative” and “viable.”  As of right now, he doesn’t seem to be viable among Republicans outside New England and maybe Michigan, much less with anyone else, and he is probably the weakest general election candidate of the leading five.  As for his conservatism, well, I have said many times what I think about his dubious claim to that label and I won’t repeat it here.  Nonetheless, this show of support makes sense for NR, and given the “viable conservative” stadard they’re using it is hard to see how they could have realistically chosen anyone else.  Thompson isn’t just non-viable at this point.  He’s an embarrassment of sorts.  The problems with McCain and Giuliani are obvious, and Huckabee’s galloping Gersonism should fill every conservative’s heart with dread.  I’m proudly supporting Ron Paul, and I am confident he would be a far better President than the one we will wind up having, but I would be kidding myself and all of you if I said I believed he was “viable” in a “win the Electoral College” sort of way.  The sorry thing about the GOP field this year is that you have some potentially viable candidates on one side and then you have the conservative candidates on the other side.  Then you have Romney, who will, if nominated, lead the GOP to a defeat reminiscent of Bob Dole’s loss or perhaps even worse.  You could make the argument that conservatives should ignore Romney’s blatant opportunism for the sake of winning the election, but I am telling you that Romney cannot deliver that victory.  There is the “Mormon factor,” but it isn’t just that.  After the last almost seven years of President Bush, the electorate will want someone trustworthy as President, and I don’t think Romney fits that description.       

Responding to the endorsement editorial, Michael makes some interesting points in a new post, developing an idea that he mentioned to me the other day:

Among my small circle, we are now wondering: perhaps Romney is the best viable choice. Not for any of the reasons National Review cites, but for his obvious cravenness. After years of suffering under Bush’s politics-of-conviction, I begin to warm to a guy who seems like he would never allow his approval ratings to go into the  20s in order to maintain the delusion that American military power can transform the Middle East into Middlebury, Conneticutt. I know that a lot of people are looking to Obama or Huckabee for a politician they can believe in. I’d rather have a guy who has no core whatsoever, whose every belief is negotiable. The last thing we need in this country is steadfast leadership from a member of our political class.

I take Michael’s point, and we could certainly stand to have a Republican more interested in normalcy rather than nostrums, to borrow a slightly hokey phrase from the election that, if Brooks is to be believed, the 2008 cycle is starting to resemble.  I don’t think people should “believe in” politicians, and not just because they will always be disappointed.  It is fundamentally unhealthy for free people to “believe in” their governors.  The one thing that keeps me from worrying too much about this aspect of the enthusiasm for Ron Paul is that I know that he would also embrace the sentiment of the Psalmist’s exhortation, “Trust ye not in princes.”  Ron Paul makes it clear time and again that the campaign is not about him, but is focused on advancing constitutional principles and liberty, and it is the principles that make the campaign successful.  With Obama and Huckabee, it is quite clear that personality and biography are driving almost everything, and these are the only reasons why people are flocking to their standards.  Looked at this way, Romney is refreshingly uninspiring, but then most people who are regularly compared to robots would be.    

The thing that bothers me about Romney, aside from the sheer dishonesty and naked ambition his candidacy represents, is that he is not a conviction politician, but he pretends to be one and tries to make his newfound convictions into one of his virtues.  If he were just an opportunist who bends whichever way the wind blows, that would be one thing, but the insufferable part is that he expects you to acknowledge that he now has deeply-held convictions that give him the authority to ridicule other candidates’ records as lacking in conservative principle.  The ad he has aired recently where he pretends that he was some tower of principled strength, never yielding to the pressures of the moment, is an insult to our intelligence.  Granted, you typically don’t win elections by advertising your utterly unprincipled power-seeking, but it seems to me that an opportunist should try to center his candidacy around things that he can still back up with evidence.  Romney actually does have some experience as a competent manager, and he should stick to that.  He has insisted that he is also a thoroughgoing conservative, and this is simply incredible.