Much has been made in the 2012 cycle of the Republican Party’s lurch to the right. And it does seem axiomatic that a political party that finds George W. Bush too liberal might have trouble fielding a competitive presidential nominee. And it also beggars belief that a class of Republican lawmakers arrived in Washington in 2010 brandishing the notion that “compromise” is a bad thing.

But polarization is not only a Republican problem. It causes Democrats to trim their sails, too, often on the same issues. A decade after NCLB’s passage, for example, few politicians in either political party will defend it. Republicans are cowed by the Tea Party; Democrats are intimidated by the teachers unions.

This is the environment Mitt Romney is operating in. Perhaps a better way of looking at it is that it’s our current politics that lacks a “core,” not Romney. Tailoring one’s political positions to satisfy such a mercurial beast, in other words, makes sense. That’s a strong argument for a third political party, perhaps, but it’s also an argument for Romney’s Republican colleagues to quit pretending that they’ve never had to trim their own sails. One of those who understood this phenomenon was Jon Huntsman. The first thing he did after dropping out of the race was to publicly endorse a Republican rival. He chose Romney.