Bloomberg writes up GOP Gov. Mitt Romney’s emergence as the alternative to McCain, noting how Romney has been courting conservatives, has avoided rookie mistakes, conveniently left the country before the Iraq Study Group report came out, and “aims to reconstitute [Bush’s] coalition.” He wants to attract “evangelical Christians with his support for a gay-marriage ban, and will try to lure economic conservatives with plans to overhaul health care and the tax system.” He also seems to be trying to set up sharp contrasts with McCain on immigration reform — he “stresses tough border enforcement over a new guest-worker plan” — and possibly on taxes.
Attacks on Romney have emerged with an unusually hard tone for being this early on a candidate who hasn’t even announced his candidacy yet. Recently, the Boston Globe trumped up charges that Romney hired gardeners who themselves hired illegal aliens, implying that Romney should have investigated and uncovered this (a brazen act which no doubt would have been equally if not more criticized) and his aspirations for president would be ruined by this shocking detail (wishful thinking).
Now a Boston-based gay newspaper has revived comments Romney “made during his 1994 Senate bid, in which he said the gay and lesbian community ‘needs more support from the Republican Party,'” per, again, the Boston Globe. In a 1994 interview with that paper, “Romney said it should be up to states to decide whether to allow same-sex marriage and he criticized Republican ‘extremists’ who imposed their positions on the party” even though he also he personally opposed gay marriage. Critics are charging this as a shift in position, hoping that readers will not notice that no actual shift has taken place.
The punchline is that twelve years later, in a recent interview with the DC Examiner, Romney “accused McCain of being ‘disingenuous’ on same-sex marriage, because McCain says he’s against [a constitutional ban of gay marriage] but believes states should decide the issue.” The criticism on Romney, in case you missed it, is that he appears to be criticizing Mccain for not falling in line with what he himself called “extremist” behavior by Republicans. This attempt at a criticism of course relies on the shallow memory of the reader, who, in order to believe this is a disingenuous line on Romney’s part must forget that 12 years ago “gay marriage” was not even heard of as an issue. Indeed, 12 years ago, anyone overly concerned about gays getting married would have been a kook in a time where there was no mass demand for it, no legal controversies over it and a liberal Democrat president named Bill Clinton had signed the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (which kept gays in the military closeted) and was on his way to sign DOMA (the Defense Of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman).
Since those 12 years when Romney wrote that letter, same-sex marriage has been forced onto the public by unelected judges in defiance of the people’s will, turning an issue that the majority of the country didn’t care about 12 years ago into an issue that 87% of the country feels strongly about. In 2004 for instance, voters in 11 states approved constitutional amendments codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. The amendments won in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Utah and even heavily blue-state Oregon, the one state where gay rights activists had hoped to prevail. The amendments passed with a 3-to-1 margin in Kentucky, Georgia and Arkansas, 3-to-2 in Ohio and 6-to-1 in Mississippi. Bans passed by narrower margins in Oregon, about 57 percent, and Michigan, about 59 percent.
Although Mitt Romney supports gay rights, as he did 12 years ago, he does not support the re-defining of what marriage is, as he didn’t 12 years ago. While Governor of Massachusetts, Romney had no friction with gay activists until his last months in office when the legislature violated the Massachusetts Constitution by refusing to vote on an amendment that would allow the state’s citizens to vote on the definition of marriage.
So far the two major attacks on Romney (that he vicariously hired illegal immigrants, and that he supports allowing the citizens to vote on matters important to them) appear to have only helped energize support for him. Perhaps these failures will move 08 criticism in the direction of actual challenges on the wisdom or merit of ones beliefs instead of cheap “gotcha” games… and perhaps Governor Pataki will win in a landslide *snicker…