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Two constituencies that President Obama is holding onto about as strongly now as he did four years ago are voters under 30 and Latinos. In what is probably not a coincidence, these two constituencies are the targets for the first two major Mitt Romney Etch A Sketch pivots of the general election. After having repeatedly denounced any need for the federal government to subsidize tuition costs during the primary, Romney has now endorsed Obama’s call for extending lower rates for federally-subsidized loans. Romney says he supports the measures “in part because of the extraordinarily poor conditions in the job market.” Apparently, he has been informed of the poor job market since wrapping up the nomination, when he was still advising graduates concerned about debt to acquire a high-paying job.
On immigration, Romney is making the turn a little more slowly, as you’d expect, given the sensitivities involved in holding together his base. Romney has deputized Marco Rubio to craft “his” own version of the Dream Act, a somewhat more restrictive version of the reform that Republicans in Congress killed and Romney opposed in the primary, when he positioned himself on the party’s right on immigration. Romney is “studying” Rubio’s bill.
Can all this really work? It is certainly remarkable how little ridicule or scrutiny Romney has attracted in his rather brazen reversals. In legal theory there exists something called a “libel-proof plaintiff,” which is a figure of such low repute that he cannot claim any monetary damages for his reputation being smeared, on the premise that his reputation is tainted beyond repair. This seems to be the point Romney has reached on the question of consistency. The entire political world regards him as a pure creature of convenience. His supporters have simply calculated that Romney has boxed himself in to the point where he could not afford to betray them.
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