Here’s how Mitt Romney is deflecting the flip-flopper charge this time around:
“In the private sector, if you don’t change your view when the facts change, you’ll get fired for being stupid,” Romney told a town hall in New Hampshire, according to ABC News.
That’s a ninja move right there.
Romney’s radical shifts on issues like abortion and gay marriage — both intensely political acts that helped transition him from a blue state-friendly Republican able to win the Massachusetts governor’s race into a more conservative-friendly presidential candidate — have defined his political career in the eyes of his critics.
But now Romney, who is doing his darnedest to make people think he never had a political career, is using his key political liability as part of his argument that he’s an outsider.
We’ll see how it plays. Democrats and Rick Perry along with others in the GOP are spooling up a new round of flip-flop attacks on Romney, thinking his past weakness (namely the view that he’s a craven political operative, ready to say whatever it takes to win a vote) will also be his Achilles heel in the next election. Romney says changing his tune just makes him a man of the people.
