Romney the Wobbly

Mitt Romney got some good news from Gallup this week. While he remains tied with Obama on a head to head matchup and Obama remains tied with himself on approval/disapproval (47%), have of Americans have suddenly decided that they like the Mitt. His personal approval rating reached 50% for the first time. His 50% favorable/41% unfavorable rating is in sharp contrast to the 39% favorable/47% unfavorable score he received back in February.

Some observers have suggested Obama's recent declaration in favor of gay marriage has a lot to do with this. That may be true, but if so I suspect that it all because Obama's evolution hurt him more than it helped him and not at all because Romney took the opposite position. While Romney's opposition to gay marriage is more in sync with how Americans actually vote than how they answered surveys, personal approval is not about that. Obama's battlefield conversion may have firmed up his support with fund raisers and activists, but it looked an awful lot like a purely calculated move. Being wishy-washy on such issues eats away at one's personal image about as fast as anything.

Meanwhile Romney has been dealing rather badly with the issue of homosexuality on a number of fronts. This is likely to catch up with him fast if he doesn't firm up. Perhaps the worst case is this one, reported by the LA Times:

In mid-April Romney hired Grenell, a former spokesman for former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, to become the foreign-policy spokesman for his campaign, starting this month. Grenell happens to be openly gay, and a vocal advocate of gay marriage -- not that those aspects have anything to do with the war in Afghanistan or Iran's nuclear program.

On Tuesday the Washington Post reported that Grenell quit his new job because of pressure from "anti-gay conservatives."…

Romney's team says it tried to persuade Grenell not to leave. And in a statement Grenell gave to the Post's Jennifer Rubin, he thanks Romney for the "clear message" that "being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team." But the statement also suggests he didn't think he could be himself in Romney's service.

There are all kinds of theories about why Grenell left, but it is difficult to believe that Romney couldn't have persuaded Grenell to stay. If he had kept Grenell on, it would have shown that Romney can stand up to pressure from his own coalition. If Grenell was doing a good job (good enough for John Bolton), then Romney should have pulled out all the stops to keep him. Failing to do the right thing, and that is surely what it looks like, makes Romney look weak and weak isn't likeable.

The second case is Romney's waffling on gay adoption. From CBS:

[Romney] said on Thursday: "And if two people of the same gender want to live together, want to have a loving relationship, or even to adopt a child -- in my state individuals of the same sex were able to adopt children. In my view, that's something that people have a right to do. But to call that marriage is something that in my view is a departure from the real meaning of that word."

But then on Friday, he was asked, in an interview with CBS' WBTV in Charlotte, N.C., how his opposition to same-sex marriage "squared" with his support for gay adoptions. Romney told anchor Paul Cameron, "Well actually I think all states but one allow gay adoption, so that's a position which has been decided by most of the state legislators, including the one in my state some time ago. So I simply acknowledge the fact that gay adoption is legal in all states but one."

It's a bad idea to talk of adoption as a right belonging to the adopter. When child custody is contested in court, the judge ought to hold the interests of the child above the claims of the parents. Sometimes that comes down to a judgment call and in such cases "rights" language does not help much.

A reasonable person can believe that being raised in a household with a mother and father is preferable to being raised in one with two parents of the same sex. That would matter, if it should matter, only in case where things were otherwise equal. Where an adoption is uncontested, a same sex couple should be judged the same way any couple would: solely by their fitness to be parents.

Romney could have said that. If he had done so firmly, he would have looked like a man who knew his own mind. The same would be true if he had come out against gay adoption, though that would be more problematic and would have been wrong, in my view. At least it would have been decisive. Instead, he used the reasonable position in favor of state prerogatives as a dodge. That makes him look indecisive, and indecisive isn't likeable.

Romney needs to firm up. He isn't seeking the Republican nomination anymore, he is running for President. He can't afford to ignore political realities and those include making sure his coalition continues to coalesce. Another political reality is that voters on the right and in the middle have to trust him. Sometimes the best way to secure that trust is to figure out what is the right thing to do and then do it.

Comments

[larry kurtz]

Wavy Gravy just had his 76th birthday:

http://hightimes.com/lounge/mike_hughes/7688

Obama in a landslide.

[A.I.]

When one flips and flops so far they hit the ground with each pass, they're bound to be wobbly. Romney's lucky he can stand at all. With a little luck, Obama & Company will fix that.

[William]

As if Obama is a paragon of truth and accountability?

Good lord, I'm certainly no fan of Romney (less of fan of Obama, obviously) but one's head spins at the versions of "flip-flop" attacks either side can wage against the other!

Neutral for both sides on "flip-flops", no one wins this game...

[Ken Blanchard]

A.I.: yes, Romney was for gay marriage, then he was against it, then he was for it again. No, wait! That was SOMEONE ELSE. And Romney promised to rely on public financing for his campaign and then decided not to; and he promised not to use super-PAC money and then decided he would. No, wait! That was SOMEONE ELSE.

I'm with William. Look up "flip-flopper" in the dictionary, you'll see Romney's picture right next to Obama's.

[A.I.]

Of the items you mention KB, only gay marriage is a policy issue that affect the rules under which we live. And while Obama has done a semantic flip-flop on this particular aspect of the gay rights struggle, he has by and large advanced those rights through both word and deed--gays openly serving in the military and refusing to defend DOMA to name a couple.

As is often noted in the media, America's sentiments regarding gay marriage have been evolving rapidly. Obama, like most successful and useful politicians, chooses language appropriate to the sensitivities of the majority of the electorate thus enabling them to advance causes that may not be popular at the moment, but are becoming so.

I'm reminded of the old FDR quote: "I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it."

[Ken Blanchard]

A.I.: you are a master of the artful qualification: yes, Obama flip-flopped on this issue and that one, but it doesn't count because...[insert artful qualification here]. In fact, both of the flip flops do involve policy issues. Obama's decision to forgo public funding in 2008 was a blow to a system that Democrats claim to believe in. His flip flop on super-PACs reinforces a system that Democrats oppose. Moreover, both of these were cases of contempt for his promises. I am sure that they don't count because [insert artful qualification here].

Your defense of Obama's position on gay marriage amounts to this: Obama has always believed in gay rights and has steadily worked in favor of that position. He has just been consistently dishonest about his real views and intentions for reasons of political expediency. I expect that is probably right. It does mean that you have no genuine objection to flip flopping whatsoever. It's okay when your guy does it, but shameful when the other guy does.

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[Yuu]

Ugh. Honestly, I'm beginning to think that Huckabee is a DNC plant, or maybe just a flack sceern for McCain. It could be that he's now getting more attention and as a result his views are in turn getting greater scrutiny, but the weirdness factor here just keeps going up. It almost does seem like he's been put in place to serve as something easy for the DNC candidate to shoot down in the general election.It turns out that Japan has slightly higher corporate taxes than us, at least according to the information I have available right now (and this is amongst the OECD member countries, too). I think the Europeans and Canadians might envy our personal income tax rates, but as far as corporations are concerned, they give up a larger percentage of their income to the U.S. government than elsewhere. That alone is a major drag on growth in our economy. I'm hoping that Romney can level the playing field between our economy and that of our foreign competitors some.