Immigration: Romney took identical position to Gingrich’s in a 2006 interview with Bloomberg,

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from Greg Sargent at WaPo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum/2011/11/28/gIQAzDrf4N_blog.html


Mitt Romney’s serial equivocations: This one will be a big deal today. Remember when Romney attacked Newt Gingrich last week for taking the humane position that longtime illegal immigrants shouldn’t be deported, even as the Romney campaign refused to say whether he thought they should be removed?

It now turns out that Romney took an almost identical position to Gingrich’s in a 2006 interview with Bloomberg, claiming that millions of immigrants “are not going to be rounded up and box-carred out,” and that they should be allowed to “get in line” for citizenship. (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/romney-s-previous-position-on-immigration-mirrors-gingrich-he-criticizes.html)

Dems and conservatives alike will seize on this, and it looks like it will prove yet another instance in which Romney abandoned a previously held sensible and humane position in order to make himself more palatable to GOP primary voters.

So, a question: At what point will major national political reporters and commentators begin to treat Romney’s serial equivocations and flip flops and outright falsehoods as a character issue, as part of a broader pattern? It didn’t take much for this to happen in the cases of Al Gore and John Kerry. To date, these Romney episodes have mostly been treated as individual flip flops and distortions, and have mostly been analyzed in terms of what they tell us about Romney’s campain strategy, rather than what they tell us about Romney himself.


read: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum/2011/11/28/gIQAzDrf4N_blog.html

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1. I expect they could find evidence of Romney taking the

identical position as anyone on either side of every issue at one time or another.