Darn it, Romney should have taken a stand against the Blunt amendment

This past Monday on a Beast panel in Detroit, John Avlon asked David Frum what advice he’d give Romney (David said stop running away from his health-care overhaul law). John asked me a different question, but if he’d asked me about the advice I’d give Romney, I’d have said: Take a stand. Choose something and take a stand that surprises people. Stand up to your base on one thing. Show that you have a spine. Because right now you are a jellyfish. People laugh at you. Your father told people where to get off constantly. For whatever psychological reason, you decided to be his opposite. Your choice. But if this race goes the way it looks as if it’s going to go, you will not only lose, but you will go down in history as a punch line. Your name will become a verb, and not a flattering one.

He won’t do it. Well, never say never. Desperation makes people do odd things, and so come mid-October, if he’s 7 points behind and it’s all slipping away from him, maybe he’ll decide then that dear old dad was right all along. But this flip-flop will live on as a pivotal moment in this campaign. Substantively supporting the Blunt bill potentially opens up a huge gender gap, and his instant back-tracking symbolizes everything that is unlikeable about the guy—and that would probably make him a lousy president, who crumples at the mere thought of what a handful of talk-radio hosts are going to be saying about him if he doesn’t cave within the hour.