Can the Massachusetts Moderate Bail Out Romney?

This is a sentence I never thought I'd have to type but: If Willard Romney doesn't win the Michigan primary on February 28, he likely will not be the Republican nominee for president. He could laugh off Rick Santorum's Minnesota-Colorado-Missouri triple play because no delegates were awarded. But if Santorum beats him in the state when his father once was governor, then it's hard not to see how a genuinely radical reboot of the whole process doesn't begin spontaneously, all over the country. Public Policy Polling has Santorum ahead by a whopping 15 points there at the moment, largely because Newt Gingrich's support is all bleeding in his direction. It's an open primary, so Democratic voters who would prefer to see Santorum as the nominee can do their mischief, and there is not only a strong fundamentalist Protestant vote in Michigan — Hillsdale College, the radical Christianist school once blighted by a sex-and-suicide scandal so tawdry that it was ripped from the headlines for an episode of Law And Order, is located there — but also it's the home office for ultramontane American Catholicism. Domino's pizza founder Thomas Monaghan, a longtime sugar daddy for various extremist Catholic causes, is a Michigan native who owned the Detroit Tigers for 11 years. Santorum has advantages on the ground in Michigan that Romney, for all his money and organization, lacks. My money says that, faced with the possibility of nominating Santorum (what a great idea — they can hold their convention in Nicaea) and probably losing 42 states in the process, what relatively sane Republicans are left will start casting around for alternatives. Come on down, Jebby!

Which raises the question: What if Romney had not spent the past seven years truckling to the people who would do nothing but come to loathe him anyway? What if he'd held to his beliefs that gay people are human and that a woman's right to choose was really something of a settled issue? What if he had run as the moderate he was in Massachusetts? What if he'd stood up for Romneycare and challenged the other people in the field?

"Okay, jamokes. I created a health-care plan that people now say they love regardless of their politics. What's your plan, Newt? Rick? Don't say 'freedom' because you sound like idiots."

He tried to do it halfway, emphasizing his business background and the fact that he had to create coalitions to govern in Massachusetts. But he also decided to pledge fealty to the entire anti-science, anti-Enlightenment wingnut agenda, despite the fact there was actual videotape out there from his past campaigns that made him look as bent as an Allen wrench on whatever his fundamental principles were. That's what's at the root of the phenomenon, now two campaigns old, and for which there are now gobs of empirical data, by which the more voters see of Willard Romney, the less they like him. (If your only remaining strength as a candidate is how much money you can spend to advertise yourself, then that data turns your primary weapon against yourself.) If he'd at least stayed consistent in the public positions he'd taken throughout his limited political career, at least he wouldn't have become the complete fake who grows more annoying by the day.

To be fair, if he'd have done all this, he probably would have lost so badly last time that he wouldn't even have been viable this time around. Maybe being consistent in his principles would have rendered him Jon Huntsman, poor soul. If you believe that, however, then you have to conclude that the Republican party is now so extreme that it barely misses qualifying as a cult. (This is the great question that your mainstream Beltway media has been trying so desperately to avoid.) But right now, looking at what's happened over the last two weeks, and facing the possibility of losing the state where he was born. Willard Romney has to be pondering the old question from Scripture about what doth it profit a man to gain the CPAC straw poll, but lose his soul.

EARLIER: The Self-Transformation of Willard Romney Is Complete >>

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