There’s a reason that the South Carolina presidential primary exit polls showed Mitt Romney lost handily to John McCain among the 31 percent of voters who listed the War in Iraq or terrorism as the most important issue facing the country (52% to 7% with the former group, 33% to 13% with the latter). He can’t — or won’t — make up his mind about whether or not he supports a timetable for troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Romney went on Good Morning America in June 2007 and said he favored a “secret timetable” for withdrawal — although Sen. Joe Lieberman made a great point Tuesday that secrecy ends when you shoot your mouth off about it on national television — but soon changed his mind when polls indicated the successful troop surge led to increased support for the current Iraq policy. When the McCain camp called him on his waffling, yet again, about a serious foreign policy matter, Romney tried to play the victim.

Unfortunately for him, that move may have cost him the GOP nomination, no matter how his campaign tries to spin it. Especially in light of new evidence from Team McCain that leaves little doubt about Romney’s deliberate equivocating on the surge.

In June 2007, when there were already good signs that the surge was working, Romney told an interviewer, “I think we would hope to turn Iraq security over to their own military and their own security forces, and if presence in the region is important for us than we have other options that are nearby.” [...] That may seem innocuous enough now. But you remember how things were at the time. That was the way both Democrats and Republican supporters of withdrawal described their plan in those days. The idea was to pull U.S. troops out of the fighting in Iraq, hand over the fight to the Iraqis, and station U.S. forces “nearby” or “over the horizon.” That was how advisers to Hillary Clinton described their preferred option. It was how people who supported the Baker-Hamilton commission report described their ideal option. They didn’t call for immediate and total abandonment of Iraq — and very few do so today. When people who favored withdrawal explained their plan, it was as Romney described it. The fact that he also talked about “timetables” in an earlier interview, albeit secret “timetables,” also puts him in what was then the withdrawal camp.

If “President” Romney ever had to deal with a crisis, and there’s a good chance that as the leader of the free world that might happen, there wouldn’t be enough time to check the latest poll numbers. There wouldn’t be enough time to call his army of lobbyists. There wouldn’t be enough time to go over flow charts and business models. He would have to act and act fast.

Thankfully, it doesn’t look like there will ever be a President Romney.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Primary Season, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.