There’s a buzz a’growin’ over today’s Boston Globe story, summarizing an upcoming National Review profile (not yet online) of Mitt Romney, Governor of Massachusetts. Romney is a prominent conservative, most recently in the news for vehemently opposing a state stem-cell-research initiative on grounds of zygotic personhood (no word on whether he wore a “Former Embryo” sign on his chest). Romney had previously pledged to support abortion rights in his gubernatorial campaign - a necessity in pro-choice Massachusetts - but has since been quietly drifting rightward.

Romney ran for US Senate in 1994 pledging to keep abortion ‘’safe and legal in this country.” As a 2002 candidate for governor, Romney said he would not change the state’s abortion laws. But in recent months, he has described himself as ‘’personally prolife” to out-of-town political audiences. And last month, he told USA Today that he is in a ‘’different place” on abortion than when he ran in 1994 against US Senator Edward M. Kennedy. A Romney spokeswoman said he had ‘’evolved over time,” but would not elaborate.

The kicker in the article is a statement by one of Romney’s top campaign advisers that Romney had been “faking” his pro-choice stance:

‘’He’s been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly,” Romney adviser Michael Murphy told the National Review in a cover story hitting newstands today titled ‘’Matinee Mitt.”

That caused an uproar over whether Romney had campaigned on false pretences, and whether he had been presenting himself since as being more moderate on reproductive issues than he actually is. It’s clear his position is much more conservative than it had been, and the simple semantic difference between his Senatorial promise and his gubernatorial promise should have been all the clue anyone needed even three years ago. But the issue today seems to be not whether he is in fact personally anti-choice, but whether he deliberately created a false impression of his position in the campaign and later.

Murphy started back-pedalling his own remarks immediately:

Murphy, a prominent Republican consultant, issued a statement of regret yesterday afternoon after a prepublication copy of the article circulated among political strategists and reporters and threatened to overshadow the positive exposure Romney was getting from appearing on the cover of two conservative magazines this week.

‘’The quote in the National Review article was not what I meant to communicate,” Murphy’s statement said. ‘’I was discussing a characterization the governor’s critics use. I regret the quote and any confusion it might have caused.”

However, nobody seems to believe that.

Kathryn Lopez, at the NRO Corner (NR’s blog), holds that Romney really only promised not to change abortion laws in Massachusetts, not that he supported them. Lopez thus undercuts both Murphy’s claim that he never made the “faking it” comment and the argument that Romney really is pro-choice - seeking to defend him only from the charge of lying about his position. This echoes Romney’s own staff in the BoGlob article:

Romney’s press staff yesterday insisted that the governor has kept his campaign promise to leave the abortion laws of Massachusetts untouched. ‘’When the governor ran for office in 2002, he promised he would not change the abortion laws of the Commonwealth, and he has kept that promise,” said his press secretary, Julie Teer.

For myself, I am not very concerned about his possibly lying about his position (I never understood why they elected him in the first place, and was not surprised at his anti-research stance, so it would be a minimal surprise if he now launched an assault on abortion also). What is interesting to me is what this portends for Romney’s open thirsting for the presidency - not what it says about his now-past state campaign.

It seems to me this development leaves Romney in a tight spot, but not about the alleged lying. He has been courting the right wing for some time, while moving away from his own previous pro-choice stance. His current position, and the embryo fixation he professed in the stem-cell debate, make it clear the pro-choice community has nothing to expect from him. What he has to explain to the right wing is why he hasn’t been a stronger champion for them - why he would agree to a cease-fire on abortion, given that he was so het-up about stem cells, and why he would go to such lengths to make himself seem pro-choice (the last thing a real anti-choicer wants even if it’s not true).

Part of Romney’s answer, of course, is that no other position is tenable in Massachusetts, and that by agreeing not to make a scene over abortion long enough to get elected, he got the chance to (unsuccessfully) make a scene over stem cells later. But I think, for the truly rabid core that drives the GOP, there will remain the whiff of tolerance about Romney that will always worry them. To placate that group, he has to come out as really vigorously anti-choice, which would then give credence to the claim that he was deliberately “disassembling” (that means to not tell the truth) by not attacking abortion as governor. Contrariwise, claiming - as he is now doing - that he really wasn’t lying in his election campaign means claiming that he really was comfortable with not doing anything to prevent abortion during his term - making him look too soft to challenge Frist or the Santorum/Delay cabal. It’s not the fact of lying, per se, that’s going to get him into trouble, but the way he deals with the charge of lying - by endorsing either an even harder-line stance on abortion (thus proving the charge of lying) or by re-endorsing his previous see-no-evil stance (proving he is not committed enough for the hard core).

Well, this is the bed he made. Let’s see how it fits him.

As has previously been noted, the propensity of extreme conservatives to equate their own children with frozen embryos leads to bad weirdness:

That just cried out for this (buy two today!):

There’s a difference.