When you see the story in its full context, three things become clear. First, this was no flip-flop. Romney is a man with many facets, groping his way through a series of fluid positions on an array of difficult issues. His journey isn’t complete. It never will be. Second, for Romney, abortion was never really a policy question. He didn’t want to change the law. What he wanted to change was his identity. And third, the malleability at Romney’s core is as much about his past as about his future. Again and again, he has struggled to make sense not just of what he should do, but of who he has been. The problem with Romney isn’t that he keeps changing his mind. The problem is that he keeps changing his story…
On Feb. 21, 2005, three days after his meeting with Hurlbut, Romney went to South Carolina to speak at a Republican dinner. The speech, aired on C-SPAN’s Road to the White House, was Romney’s first attempt to present himself as a cultural conservative. He talked about the importance of religion and the perils of gay marriage, which had invaded Massachusetts. And then he brought up cloning. “Science must respect the sanctity of human life,” he said. “The creation of life for destruction is simply wrong.”
Romney’s audience applauded. He was learning the language of life, just as he had once learned the language of choice. But again, there was a strange emptiness in his words. He didn’t say the destruction of life was wrong. Indeed, he supported that destruction, in the form of research on spare embryos. Nor did he mention abortion. In fact, Romney’s staff couldn’t explain what his position was. “Some aides say he is clearly pro-choice,” wrote veteran South Carolina reporter Lee Bandy. “Others claim they have been led to believe otherwise.”
If this was a conversion, it was a curious one. Romney’s epiphany seemed to have affected his political self-presentation more than his policies. His flash of insight in the Nov. 9 meeting—it hit me hard at that very moment that the Roe v. Wade philosophy had cheapened the value of human life—had somehow failed to inspire him to say anything against Roe or abortion rights, which, as far as anyone knew, he still supported. And this matched Romney’s Nov. 9 statement to Myers: I am no longer content with the description of my position. I want to call myself pro-life. Romney had meant exactly what he said. He wasn’t changing his position. He was changing his language.
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