Cold Reception for Mitt

Governor Romney is out in Michigan today, raising his political profile in his birth state with a speech in front of the Michigan GOP state senate fundraiser. You have to wonder after Mitt's track record this past election in state senate races here in Massachusetts if the Michigan Republicans really want his help, but that's a question for another day. Today, the Globe reports that a conservative group wrote a letter to Republican state senators in Michigan protesting the "liberal" Romney's positions particularly on abortion and inexplicably on gay marriage.

We hope you will not allow your event or your hospitality to be used to in any way validate or legitimize Governor Mitt Romney's support of legal abortion-on-demand or his endorsement of homosexual activists' political agenda," Gary Glenn of the American Family Association of Michigan wrote in a letter to the Republican state senators Romney will address at a fund-raiser tonight for the Michigan GOP.

I'm sure the so-called homosexual activists in Massachusetts are just as surprised as anyone that Mitt is endorsing them.

This should serve as a clear signal to Romney that he is not going to be able to have it both ways. He can't simultaneously run to the right to position himself for the presidency in 2008 and position himself in the nebulous center where the mythical Massachusetts swing voter lives. If is out-of-state rhetoric allows the Mass Dems to turn him into a Bush clone, he's toast in 2006, but if his in-state rhetoric allows outside conservatives to turn him into the Republican Ted Kennedy, he's sunk in 2008.

Speaking of the Mass Dems, they've brought back Ani-Mitt. If you haven't seen it before, it's worth checking out. If nothing else, you'll never look at Eric Fehrnstrom the quite the same way again.