Why Romney Will Never Be President

(At least, I hope.) People say things like this about him:

The real Romney is clearly an extraordinarily ambitious man with no perceivable political principle whatsoever. He is the most intellectually dishonest human being in the history of politics.

There's another good line here from Reid via Carville:

I’ve learned one thing in listening to all the debates and reading about all these people running for office, and the one fact I’ve learned, I can’t get out of my mind, is that Rudy Giuliani has been married more times than Mitt Romney’s been hunting.

Which is exactly the kind of dismissively nasty quip the Democrats need to be churning out on a consistent basis. But it doesn't really get to the heart of why Romney is such a dangerous candidate. And that's, to me at least, a certain...shall we say, flexibility.

Watching Romney, I get a sense of just why Clinton managed to so outrage the conservatives. It seems like there's no position he's met that he won't reverse course on if he thinks there's some political gain to be had. No issue he won't pander to if he thinks it'll play in the polls. No line he won't cross in his desire to, above all else, get elected.

I don't have a sense that this is a person with morals, with principles, that he'll stand up and fight for. I have a sense that this is a pragmatic politician who's going to bend and twist whichever way the winds are blowing. He's – sadly – probably going to run a better administration than the other Republican frontrunners (Who are Giuliani, who's crazy as a shit house rat with a chip on his shoulder, and McCain, who never met a war he didn't like.) but it's going to be a conservative administration. And there's no telling just which interest will come to dominate it. Which muck will bubble to the top from the swampy waters of the grand conservative coalition of people who want an American Sharia or to bomb the rest of the world into submission or, that old favorite, the business owning fat cats. He might not have the vision, the arrogance of the current administration but his policies are only going to be degrees away. Especially should he actually win the election and his base of support starts calling in their markers.