The right wing has lost the election of 2012.I'm OK with that, as long as Obama and the left wing loses. It'll be a whale of a lot easier to rebuild with Mitt in the White House.
The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year's best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to endorse the full-throated conservatism he embraced to win the Republican nomination.
Maybe he learned something from the "Smartest President Ever' - get elected first.
The right is going along because its partisans know Romney has no other option. This, too, is an acknowledgment of defeat, a recognition that the grand ideological experiment heralded by the rise of the tea party has gained no traction. It also means that conservatives don't believe that Romney really believes the moderate mush he's putting forward now. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the conservatives are forgiving Romney because they think he is lying, what should the rest of us think?
The rest of you should think he is more interested in progress than ideological stalemate.
It turns out that there was no profound ideological conversion of the country two years ago. We remain the same moderate and practical country we have long been. In 2010, voters were upset about the economy, Democrats were demobilized, and President Obama wasn't yet ready to fight. All the conservatives have left now is economic unease. So they don't care what Romney says. They are happy to march under a false flag if that is the price of capturing power.
Didn't that happen four years ago?
Romney knows that, by substantial margins
The biggest sign that tea party thinking is dead is Romney's straight-out deception about his past position on the rescue of the auto industry.
"Ideas have consequences" is one of the conservative movement's most honored slogans. That the conservatives' standard-bearer is now trying to escape the consequences of their ideas tells us all we need to know about who is winning the philosophical battle -- and, because ideas do matter, who will win the election.
And now, left E. J. Dionne embraces the conservative movement's most honored slogans. What shall we think of him?