THE MITT THAT GOT AWAY

Taegan Goddard, while acknowledging that Sarah Palin probably helped John McCain a bit Thursday night, still wonders what might have been:

Imagine if Sen. John McCain had chosen Mitt Romney as his running mate instead. While Romney would not likely have excited the Republican base as much as Palin did, he would be seen as a more steady hand with the nation's financial markets in crisis. And it's unlikely that McCain would be pulling out of Michigan if native son Romney was on the ticket.

Goddard is right about Michigan -- but I think he's forgetting what a nutjob Romney has become.

Remember Romney's bizarre Republican convention speech last month, in which he argued that the status quo in Washington is too liberal?

Is Washington now, liberal or conservative? Let me ask you some questions.

Is a Supreme Court decision liberal or conservative that awards Guantanamo terrorists with constitutional rights? It's liberal.

Is a government liberal or conservative that puts the interests of the teachers union ahead of the needs of our children? It's liberal.

Is a Congress liberal or conservative that stops nuclear power plants and off-shore drilling, making us more and more dependent on Middle Eastern tyrants? It's liberal.

Is government spending, putting aside inflation, liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? It's liberal.

We need change all right: change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.

And remember the speech he gave to the Conservative Political Action Committee back in February, which seemed as if it must have sounded better in the original German?

The threat to our culture comes from within. The 1960's welfare programs created a culture of poverty. Some think we won that battle when we reformed welfare, but the liberals haven't given up. At every turn, they try to substitute government largesse for individual responsibility. They fight to strip work requirements from welfare, to put more people on Medicaid, and to remove more and more people from having to pay any income tax whatsoever. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is a culture-killing drug -- we have got to fight it like the poison it is!

That CPAC speech took place around the time Romney was meeting with Ralph Reed, Paul Weyrich, Bay Buchanan, Laura Ingraham and other far-rightists "to discuss the former Massachusetts governor becoming the face of conservatism."

Goaded on by Steve Schmidt, Romney probably would have been even more of a culture warrior than Palin is now.

Add that to the fact that he would never have attracted the huge wave of new volunteers to the McCain campaign that Palin attracted, and the fact that Romney and McCain together would have been a ticket that owned twelve houses worth about $35 million, and the fact that many of the same evangelicals who've long mistrusted McCain believe Mormonism is a cult, and the fact that a Romney pick never would have stolen the headlines from Barack Obama's convention speech, and it's obvious that picking Mitt would have done McCain no good.

Damn -- what a missed opportunity for us.