Posted on 11/15/2007 10:51:56 AM PST by pissant
The four leading Republican candidates for president have demonstrated that they have four distinct styles of flip-flopping.
Mitt Romney is the most notorious flip-flopper in the field, and his most notorious flip-flop concerned abortion. He claims that a conversation with scientists about human cloning made him see how abortion had devalued human life. Nobody can prove that Romney isn’t telling the truth, but nobody quites believe him, either. Romney has also changed positions on guns, immigration, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. But it is not the number of his flip-flops that has impressed people so much as how they have altered his political character. He was a moderate technocrat a few years ago, but has become a culture warrior.
Rudy Giuliani presents himself as a man who respects conservatives too much to pander to them. Social conservatives, he argues, should trust him more since he doesn’t alter his positions to suck up to them. But Giuliani has switched his positions on guns, partial-birth abortion, immigration, and civil unions, in each case moving rightward. He has been pretty consistent in his flip-flop methodology: He finds some detail that justifies the switch. The detail is usually bogus. He said, for example, he was able to support a ban on partial-birth abortion because it included a life-of-the-mother exception - but the one he had opposed had included that exception, too. He said that he would no longer support the lawsuit he initiated against gunmakers, primarily because the case had “taken several turns and several twists that I don’t agree with.” (He then qualified that with a “probably.”) But the principal turn is that the plaintiffs have scaled back their demands. He came out against “comprehensive” immigration reform not because it included amnesty, but because it didn’t create adequate databases.
When Al Gore flipped from pro-life to pro-choice during his first run for president, one of his aides told a reporter that his strategy for dealing with his past was to “deny, deny, deny.” Fred Thompson seems to have copied his abortion strategy from the man whose Senate seat he took. The difference is that it’s a pro-choice past that he denies having. He distinguishes himself from Romney on abortion by saying that he, Thompson, was with pro-lifers yesterday and will be with them tomorrow. What Thompson can’t admit is that he wasn’t with pro-lifers the day before yesterday.
John McCain’s main flip-flop has been on taxes. He voted against Bush’s tax cuts, but now he wants to keep them. He justifies the switch by saying that circumstances have changed. He hasn’t apologized for his earlier vote. But to allow the tax cuts to expire now would be to raise taxes. As David Brooks noted the other day, McCain is never terribly convincing when he does something he doesn’t believe in. Earlier this year he said that tax cuts always raise revenue. It’s a nonsensical claim, but it also makes his overall argument impossible to sustain. One of his principal objections to the Bush tax cuts was that they would increase the deficit. If he now thinks that tax cuts increase revenue, he was wrong and should say so.
If I had to judge the matter, I’d say that Thompson and Giuliani go about their flip-flopping with a bit more dishonesty than Romney and McCain. But if you want edification, look away from the whole field.
Flipper Alert PING
Great find! LOL!
Mr. Ramesh Ponnuru is wrong about one man, Thompson.
Where it mattered, in his voting, he was 100% pro-life.
No matter what the pro-life bill was, he voted everytime for the protection of the unborn.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
You’re losin’ it. Get a grip, would ya’?
This piece also overlooked McCain’s flip-flop on illegal immigration (now he gets it, he says). It’s just THE issue that drove the final big spike into his presidential run.
Can Feb. get here fast enough...?
The field will be narrowed...and still, no one will be happy...
Where will National Review and the GOP be come election day?
And the country the day after?
Love it!! All four are flippers!!!! Be gone all of them. Duncan for President!!!!!!! It still stuns me that conservatives are not backing him...well real conservatives are but I guess FREEPERS are flippers and flip back and forth on conservatism when convenient.
The article not withstanding, I would love to be on that beach, in that water or on my boat a few feet this side of that photo.
I think I may take a nap to dream myself into that photo.
That’s gonna leave a mark.
Out of all the upper tier candidates, Huckabee is probably the only one I would trust to tell the truth.
I guess all those pro-life votes Fred made as a Senator were just figments of our imagination, huh, Ramesh?
These numbskulls don’t understand what flip-flopping really is.
Ramesh has been feuding with Fred about the 'meaning of Federalism' for several months.
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