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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (653148)	4/29/2012 5:30:30 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 1578510

Mitt Romney and flip-flop fatigue By Greg Sargent wash post A couple months ago, during the GOP primary, I speculated that Mitt Romney was benefitting from a phenomenon you might call “flip-flop fatigue.” The crush of equivocations, reversals and rhetorical contortions had gotten so relentless and ubiquitous that people had grown too exhausted to bother tracking or objecting to them anymore. In the context of the general election, this has only grown more pronounced. If anyone thought conservatives, or neutral commentators, would hold Romney to the positions he professed to hold during the primary — and wouldn’t let him pivot towards middle in the general election — the early signs are that he will be granted all the maneuvering room he’ll need. In the last few days, Romney has signaled that he is Etch-A-Sketching away his previous positions on immigration and on student loans. Romney has now hinted that he’s open to supporting Marco Rubio’s DREAM Act. If Romney embraces Rubio’s approach, as seems likely, will he pay any price from the right? Romney’s own immigration adviser, Kris Kobach, has said any such measure would also have to include self-deportation to be acceptable to conservative hard-liners. But now Kobach is already signaling that he thinks he and Rubio can coexist comfortably in Romney’s universe. Meanwhile, during the primary, Romney repeatedly drew a hard line against government help with student debt. But as soon as Obama launched a campaign to extend low interest rates on federally funded student loans, and signaled that he’d make it central in the presidental race, Romney supported Obama’s position. Will conservatives who previously opposed the Obama student loan measure revolt? Well, House Republicans are already finessing the issue by signaling that there may not be any significant differences between them and Romney on the issue, after all. Putting aside the reaction from conservatives, who have their own reasons for letting Romney’s pivoting skate, both of these turnarounds are being widely covered in the press as mere process stories, as if they’re as inevitable and unremarkable as a campaign staffing up in advance of the general. Call it flip-flop fatigue in reverse. First Romney flip-flopped to the right, away from previously held positions, in order to get through the primary. While some of his rivals objected, many commentators treated it as business as usual, as stuff Romney just had to say to appeal to the right wing base. And now, precisely because commentators previously decided he didn’t mean any of the stuff he said to get through the primary, few if any are holding him accountable for those positions now in any meaningful way, and he’s paying little price in the way of pundit scorn for flip-flopping right back to the center again. It was all part of the game before, and it’s all part of the game once again.

To: i-node who wrote (653148)	4/29/2012 5:32:32 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 1578510

Romney’s solar flip-flopThe first time he ran for president, he liked green power. What changed?BY ANDREW LEONARD businessinsider.com Of course, politicians have every right to change their minds. An inflexible attitude is not always the sign of an effective leader. But too many flips without enough explanation may give voters pause. In Romney’s case, many of his moves have been from the left — when he was governor of Massachusetts — to the right, as he has run for the Republican presidential nomination.

To: i-node who wrote (653148)	4/29/2012 5:40:07 AM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1578510

Biden: Romney 'out of touch' on foreign policy By NBC's Carrie Dann NEW YORK -- Vice President Joe Biden charged Thursday that a flip-flopping Mitt Romney remains "mired in a Cold War mindset" and has "a profound misunderstanding of the responsibilities of a president and a commander in chief." In one of the Obama campaign's harshest critiques of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to date, Biden accused the GOP's presumptive nominee of cravenly criticizing the president on policies he's previously backed, unwisely planning to "outsource" foreign policy decision-making to the State Department, and being "completely out of touch" with the realities of the global stage today. And he implied that his boss's chief rival would not have taken the same action as the president in greenlighting a risky operation to kill 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. "You can't say for certain what Gov. Romney would have done," Biden said of Obama's decision in remarks to a crowd of about 500 students and foreign policy buffs at New York University's School of Law. Invoking his unofficial slogan for the 2012 re-election campaign -- "Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive" -- Biden warned, "You have to ask yourself, if Gov. Romney were president, could he have used the same slogan in reverse?" Much of Biden's over-45 minute address centered on President Barack Obama's leadership in officially ending the Iraq War, drawing down troop levels in Afghanistan, and pulling the trigger on a bin Laden mission that the vice president said would have ended Obama's political career if it failed. In each case, Biden argued that Romney at some past point in his political career had voiced support for those objectives but had criticized them for political expediency during the GOP primary. "In the face of the challenges that we now understand are ahead of us, what would Gov. Romney do?" he asked. "The truth is we don't know for certain but we know where the governor starts. He starts with a profound misunderstanding of the responsibilities of a president and a commander in chief." Biden, a longtime Democratic leader of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, said that Romney hopes to "outsource" international policy issues to the State Department, citing a 2007 quote in which the former Massachusetts governor said "a president is not a foreign policy expert." "That kind of thinking may work for a CEO but I assure you it will not and cannot work for a president," Biden said. In a conference call with reporters held before the vice president's speech, Romney's foreign policy advisers pushed back on the idea that the GOP leader would return the United States to unpopular Bush-era policies, dubbing the current commander-in-chief's worldview a "Carter/Obama doctrine" that deviates from America's traditional exercise of "peace through strength." The vice president's address was the fifth "framing speech" in a series intended to draw stark contrasts between Obama and Romney, although today's was the first since Romney's GOP rivals Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum announced their withdrawals from the primary contest. Biden's tone was somber for much of the speech, although he won laughter from the mostly student-aged crowd when describing the president's decisiveness. "This guy's got a backbone like a ramrod. For real. For real," he insisted as the audience giggled. And, quoting the old foreign policy adage to "speak softly and carry a big stick," Biden responded with his own, well, schtick. "I promise you, the president has a big stick," he said. NBC's Garrett Haake contributed