Centerfield

I think centrists will just have to deal with the fact that any candidate will need his party's nomination first. That will require trying to appeal/reach out to the breadth of the party. Its funny we like our parties to have "big tents" but we don't want our guy to talk to everyone in the tent. I'm sure the conservatives get upset when the candidate, once nominated back peddles from previous statements and tries to move to the center.

Same as it ever was. Run to the wings for the primary, then back to the center for the general. It's tough to know what the candidate really thinks and does without going back a ways, to before their run-up to the race.

Like I said in a thread well below, I expect Romney to hold off as long as possible in his announcement that he's NOT going to run for re-election to MA governor.

I'm surprised at how many people from out of state think Romney is a moderate, and at all the people from MA (not just you Rick)who are now saying that Romney has "moved right." That may be true strictly in terms of amping up different rhetoric, but it's been as plain as the nose on my face for over a decade that Romney is a true, traditional, old school conservative.

Bush was the beta version of compassionate conservative. Romney is Compassionate Conservative 2008, wiuth a lot of the bugs and kinks worked out. Better looking, better spoken, more well-versed in and more willing to examine the minutiae of a variety of issues.

Last I heard, he's still pro-choice though. I believe the line he used in South Carolina was "personally pro-life," but opposed to changing current laws on the subject. Social cons on GOP blogs were very upset. Do you guys think he plans to move to the right on that issue in the next couple of years?

Romney has said he's personally pro-life. He's also made statements about "upholding" a woman's right to choose. But he's also been cagey and careful about his choice of words. I've always felt that his phrasing was lawyerly, that he was trying to get people to think he meant something other than what he was saying.

I've always felt that his position was really that as the state's chief executive, he'd uphold the law, and that their was no chance the issue would come before the courts, making the issue somewhat irrelevant. When he has said he'd "uphold a woman's right to choose," I always thought he meant that he'd do it because it was his job as Governor to uphold all the laws as curently written and interpreted. not that he'd oppose efforts to curtail abortions beyond the late-term.

I don't know that he's ever said point-blank that he'd stand with the pro-choice crowd and not the pro-life crowd if it came to legislation trying to change the laws, but I could be wrong, and I don't want to put words in his mouth.

However, my intuition, based on his always careful phrasing, is that he has done a good job of helping people to hear what they want to hear. We'll see. If he's really does acknowedge that this sort of decision is difficult and painful and the kind of action he'd never want to see, but nevertheless best left to the individual, then good for him.