With respect to our friend Hugh Hewitt, I think Michael Walsh’s column gets to the big problem with Mitt. It’s not that he’s a glib, finger-in-the-windy opportunist of no fixed principles; it’s worse than that: He has a weird knack for reaching into the icebox to pull out the conventional wisdom when it’s five years past its sell-by date.
He bragged about “protecting a woman’s right to choose,” which might have made sense for a pandering RINO squish in the late Eighties but not by the time he did it in 2002.
He embraced the governmentalization of health care not in the 1970s but at exactly the moment when, at home and abroad, the reality of the impact of Third Party universalism was plain to everybody who thought seriously about this issue.
Now he’s come out in favor of global warming not when it was actually happening (over a decade ago) but two years after the peer-review hit the fan in East Anglia, Copenhagen, and at the IPCC.
This is like watching your parents do the Macarena: It’s embarrassing and it’s dated.
Mitt had a lot going for him last time round, but he seems determined not to learn from experience. And the least that voters are entitled to in a time of crisis is a presidential candidate who’s one step ahead of the conventional pieties, not someone so out of it that he orders his political positions from the remainder bin.