Flip-flopping: In politics, a mind can be a terrible thing to change

The candidate’s position was clear and direct: “I have no purpose to interfere with the institution of slavery,” he said. “I have no lawful right to do so.”

But as president, he declared the slaves free, at least in some states, by executive order.

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Abe Lincoln, flip-flopper? Or did the Great Emancipator simply evolve?

Ronald Reagan was for a woman’s right to choose an abortion before he was against it, yet his shift was widely viewed as principled evolution, not craven politics.

Mitt Romney has made much the same journey, only to find himself battered by skepticism about his motives and principles. After months of attacks about position-switching from his Republican primary opponents, Romney was markedly restrained in responding to President Obama’s announcement this month that he was flipping from opposing same-sex marriage to endorsing it.

In politics, a mind can be a terrible thing to change.

Attack ads featuring spinning weather vanes and double-talking candidates have become a staple of American campaigns, but consultants who make those ads say the flip-flopper charge doesn’t always stick — and no one has a formula to predict exactly when it will.

But there are reasons why some politicians’ changes of heart strike voters as evidence of duplicity and others are accepted as the result of reasoned reconsideration — and America’s cultural divide on social issues might explain why certain flip-flopper charges hit home.

“Voters tend to be fair-minded about this kind of thing,” said Geoff Garin, a longtime Democratic pollster and strategist. “Voters look for obvious motive, for cravenness. You get extra demerits for being a repeat offender.”

Was it flip-flopping, evolving or adapting to altered circumstance when Obama changed direction about closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for terror suspects, or about the wisdom of standing by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, or about whether Obama campaign officials would appear at fundraisers for super PACs?

This month, after many months of saying that his position on same-sex marriage was “evolving,” Obama finally announced he had completed his shift from “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman,” as he put it in 2008, to “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

The resulting criticism focused not on the honesty of his belief, but on his timing — was he just coming out with his support to win contributions from wealthy gay donors? Obama largely escaped the flip-flop charge because, Garin said, “lots of people assumed this was really Obama’s position all along.”

In contrast, on abortion, Romney had sent mixed signals for most of his political career. He explained his original pro-choice position on Fox News last year as more a matter of strategy than of principle; when he settled on his original position in Massachusetts, Romney said, he decided that “I’m just going to say I will support the law and preserve the law as it exists.”

“Romney is more suspect because he’s in the serial offender category,” Garin said, noting that on issues such as abortion, gay rights and gun control, the Republican candidate often defends his current positions by saying they aren’t that different from his past stances.