Romney stressed Tuesday that he opposed a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he did not disown his provocative remark. That's because he is a finger-in-the-wind kind of guy, and he's well-aware that the prevailing winds have shifted within the party. There was a time, roughly spanning the eras from Nixon to Bush II, when virtually all Republicans embraced the hawkish credo of muscular interventionism. But not anymore.
In a stunning Gallup poll last month, 47 percent of Republicans who responded favored bringing the troops home from Afghanistan. Romney was essentially speaking to those people, massaging their war weariness. Just as remarkably, the debate audience didn't laugh at him. At the Republican debates four years ago, the audiences frequently laughed when Rudy "9/11" Giuliani treated antiwar Rep. Ron Paul as comic relief.
In other words, this is no longer a unified party that yearns to fight wars of liberation worldwide. The neoconservatives who dominated during the George W. Bush era are still with us, of course, but now they're flanked by Republicans who openly question the mission in Afghanistan - when President Obama is set to decide the pace of the troop withdrawals slated to begin July 1 - and who question whether an open-ended interventionist posture is even affordable given our fiscal woes.
