Real Clear Politics picked up and wrote about a topic that's been bubbling up to the top of some of the GOP 2012 discussion forums: Romney's Low Profile on Budget Debate...
The headline adds a couple of more words: "Rankles Foes" but I'm not really rankled. I don't expect him to actually take a position on it, because he doesn't need to. The GOP rank-and-file is sharply divided on this issue, and Romney knows, better than any of the other politicians in the race, that it's much easier to avoid taking a position than it is to take both sides a position. He has nothing to gain by taking either position, so therefore it's best for him to go on vacation.
(In other words, I expect him to be a spineless political sociopath in matters of electoral politics, so there's not much to get rankled about. He's Mitt Romney, and as such it is safe to assume he is firmly on both sides of every issue, including this one.)
However, another "exciting new face" has also been conspicuously absent from the cameras and editorial pages: that of Florida's TEA Party darling Marco Rubio.
It's understandable. I mean if you wanted to be Mitt Romney's vice-president, isn't this what you'd do?
It's too soon to oficially chant, "I told you so," but it painfully obvious that, like Allan West, Rubio is another "Bait-N-Switch" candidate. He ran and won on a record that didn't match his rhetoric, but in the race between Rubio and Crist it was pretty difficult to argue that Rubio wasn't the more conservative. And so, the TEA Party adopted him by default.
Yep - I said it. Rubio is not really not conservative enough to be considered a TEA Party candidate, and calling him that requires ignoring both the subtle signs of betrayal in his voting record as well as the Sentaor's distinct elucidations that he isn't a true TEA Party supporter. In short, he's a hard core member of the GOP and as such we can assume that McConnell won't ever need to sneer at him to "get his ass in line," as Boehner recently did to his Tea Party dissenters.
However, while adding Rubio to the Romney ticket won't bring in the excitement that Palin brought to McCain, it will bring Romney a claim of having a small government VP,, a significant chunk of the TEA Party media attention, and of course, the ever-gullible disenfranchised GOP vote.
And the small government movement will lose again.
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