Yo, Semitest - I’m not going to bounce back at you on any of that, except to say that by ‘conservative pragmatist’ I’m neither coining a new political term nor even invoking anything political-historical about the words.
Romney is for everything a real conservative is for. What he says out loud and how he tries to move in that direction, effectively, on the Earth, is pragmatic.
Of course neither of us can prove anything. I only write to remove a little bit of the stress a lot of people are feeling about him.
The question ultimately is: If you are conservative, will you be better off in four years if Romney (in terms of your fight against abortion, fight for national fiscal stability, fight to curb the shredding of the Constitution, fight to preserve the idea that liberty comes before government because liberty comes from God) would you be better off than if Paul, Palin, Newt etc. were president. Forget personalities, forget ideology, forget how you feeeeeel, even if you have to swallow the puke in your mouth when you pull the lever.
You would be better off, because none of those 3, or many other figures, are actually capable of moving the country, of causing a result, rather than maintaining eternal ‘hope and change’ like some we know. You might hear what you want to hear for 4 years from your president, but hearing what you want to hear, having your guy in power, is not what actually changes the country. It doesn’t, in itself, produce results ... movement towards your goal. In some cases, it produces a backlash.
re: The Establishment: Yeah - he’s from the Republican Establishment ... but even a blind squirrel sometimes, even by mistake, even for all the wrong reasons, bumbles into a nut.
Best!