And yes, I'm aware that even after six years of campaigning, Romney has garnered only 25 percent support within your party. I get it that you don't want to eat your peas and embrace a serial flip-flopper whose renunciations of past liberal stances may or may not be sincere.
I can't deny that Romney has the mien and breeding of an old-style Northeastern moderate Republican, a species that has all but vanished from the cosmos. I can't dispute GOP activist Craig Shirley's observation that Romney "scares the hell out of conservatives," although he might've gone overboard Tuesday when he compared Romney to the communists in the '30s Moscow show trials; as Shirley put it, "No one knows what to believe about those who opposed Stalin or what to believe about Romney."
Now, now. You might not like Romney, but there's no need to red-bait the guy just because he supported abortion choice in blue-state Massachusetts 17 years ago and just because he championed statewide health-care reform five years ago. All the conservative litmus tests can't mask one fundamental fact that your party ignores at its peril:
Romney is eminently electable. You want to win, don't you?
I'll concede that his electoral track record is less than stellar. Romney boasts that he's "not a career politician," but that's true largely because he has been thwarted in that career. He lost 16 Republican primaries in 2008. He lost a 1994 Senate race. He won the Massachusetts gubernatorial race in 2002 (his only electoral win) but said no to a second race in 2006 when the polls looked bad. It was tough being a Republican in a blue state, but, as a technocrat trained in the financial sector, he wasn't exactly Bill Clinton on the stump.
