Killer Rabbits
Mitt Romney tried to look like a hunter -- and ended up shooting himself in the foot.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

THERE ARE things in politics that money can't buy, and chief among them is the quality of authenticity: the ability to convince voters that a candidate is more than the sum of positioning by his or her handlers. Last week, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was the latest to discover that truth. His week started off with a bang -- the announcement that he led the GOP pack in first-quarter presidential fundraising. It ended with a self-inflicted wound -- his effort to portray himself as an avid hunter.

"I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I've been a hunter pretty much all my life," Mr. Romney said at an event in New Hampshire, answering a man wearing a National Rifle Association cap who asked about his view of the right to bear arms.

That was technically true but fundamentally misleading: The teenaged Mr. Romney had hunted rabbits with his cousins during a summer on a ranch in Idaho; then, much later, Mr. Romney shot quail on a game preserve in Georgia during a retreat for big GOP donors.

This posturing became a particular problem for Mr. Romney in large part because it reinforced the existing narrative of the governor as a politician willing to change his ideological stripes to fit the political environment of the moment. Mr. Romney's views on subjects ranging from abortion to gay rights to gun control have changed -- "evolved and deepened," the candidate says -- as he has made the transition from running as a Republican in a bright-blue state to seeking the nomination in a process dominated by a conservative base.

"I don't line up with the NRA," said Romney in 1994. "I'm after the NRA's endorsement," says Romney in 2007.

As it happens, while Mr. Romney was shooting himself in the foot by trying to portray himself as something he is not, one of his rivals, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, was causing potential problems for his own campaign by doing just the opposite: restating his previously expressed views.

Dealing with a subject even more volatile than gun control, Mr. Giuliani said that he is personally opposed to abortion but that he continues to believe the decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy should be up to the individual woman. "Ultimately I believe it's an individual right and a woman should make that choice," Mr. Giuliani said in South Carolina, not the most hospitable venue for abortion rights supporters.

Not only that, Mr. Giuliani reiterated his support for public funding of abortion in some circumstances. "Ultimately, it's a constitutional right, and therefore if it's a constitutional right, ultimately, even if you do it on a state-by-state basis, you have to make sure people are protected," Mr. Giuliani told CNN.

In the context of Republican Party politics, Mr. Giuliani's candor could be as problematic as Mr. Romney's positioning. But we suspect that in the end voters will have more respect for forthright politicians with whom they disagree than for ones who seem as willing as Mr. Romney to mold their political personae to the needs of the moment.