Flip-flopping can be learning curve

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Updated: January 7, 2012 8:07AM

The conventional wisdom about Republicans is that they place defeating President Barack Obama as their top priority. It’s sometimes been hard to credit that view when Republicans flirt with the likes of Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain and vault them to the top of the polls. That conventional wisdom will get a real-world test when Republicans start voting in January.

With the first caucus and primaries just weeks away, Republicans are flirting — maybe that’s too weak a word given his meteoric rise in the polls — with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. No rational observer of politics would place Gingrich at the top of a list of most electable candidates, even among what has been a weak GOP field.

That’s not to say he couldn’t win given his considerable political skills and experience, his brains and his grasp of policy issues and government — and the sour economy. But the odds are much longer for him than Mitt Romney, widely acknowledged as having the best chance to beat Obama.

Gingrich is doing so well in the polls that Politico reports many of his critics in the party have gone silent out of a recognition that he may end up the nominee. The thinking is that he has emerged as the latest anti-Romney so close to the voting that there may not be sufficient time for one of his characteristic eruptions of bombastic policy statements or unattractive grandiosity to derail his candidacy. The cause for real anxiety for the GOP is that there would be plenty of time for something like that in a general election.

That said, no one has actually voted yet. Romney remains atop the polls in advance of the vital New Hampshire primary. That state’s sometimes unpredictable voters also offer the only chance for former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman — a Romney-like candidate without Romney’s baggage — to work his way into the race.

Romney’s problem — hence Gingrich’s opportunity as the latest anti-Romney contender — is that Republicans suspect he is insufficiently committed to conservative principles. He’s been hit by his rivals as a flip-flopper on issues such as abortion, climate change and immigration.

Anticipating Romney will end up as the nominee, Obama’s supporters also have hit this theme hard. The Democratic National Committee is out with a four-minute video commercial citing what it called Romney’s shifts on key issues. But Glenn Kessler, the political fact checker for the Washington Post, examined the 10 Democratic claims and found only three of them to be correct (with one more rated as “uncertain”).

Anyone who has spent time in public life, high office and politics will change some positions. It comes down to learning on the job and to adjusting to new information about an issue.

Obama has had some changes that a political opponent could call flip-flopping. He was against the health insurance mandate for all Americans before he was for it. Candidate Obama was a fierce critic of President George W. Bush’s national security tactics, but as president he has adopted nearly all of them. In 2008, Obama campaigned to end the Bush tax cuts for top earners, then after the 2010 mid-term elections he flipped to support extending them for a while and now has flopped back to ending them.

The White House would like to make the top 2012 issue be Romney’s alleged flip-flops and not Obama’s incompetent handling of the economy. If the campaign is about jobs, Obama loses his.