It's the second article about Romney trying to reduce expectations of conservatives that we'll get a conservative candidate. It now appears clear that Romney — or at least some people in his campaign — are trying to float trial balloons about “moving to the center” in the fall election.
It looks like this earlier “Liberated from the Tea Party” article wasn't just a one-time incident.
That earlier article was here: http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2867161/posts
This trial balloon needs to get shot down — **NOW.**
Some of us on Free Republic are willing to put up with Romney as the nominee because they think he'll govern as a conservative. These articles are pointing to the opposite, namely, that he seems to be exploring the possibility of following Bob Dole's model of campaigning in the primary one way and then torpedoing his base in the general election.
Time is running very short to stop Romney. It may already be too late. But these articles indicate that at least some people in the Romney campaign are planning to move toward Obama to try to win the election as a moderate, and if that happens, we've got a tremendously worse problem on our hands than we have now.
Right, so why worry about "stopping" Romney from becoming the awful Dole-ish "I was conservative in the primaries, but that was just to fool the rubes" MOR-stripe-hugger in the general? As Robert Graves wrote in Claudius the God (the sequel to I, Claudius), "Let all the poison that is in the mud hatch out!"
Sometimes, you have to let bad men show everybody how bad they are, and that includes the Walking Gods who send articles over to the Washtington Times and NRO to be published for consumption by the rabble.