Stanley: Romney's Pro-Choice Misstep?

Tim Stanley writes in The Daily Telegraph:

Mitt Romney has refused to sign a pledge offered by a prominent pro-life group, rekindling suspicions that he is a closet liberal. The move seems to confirm that Romney thinks the Republican primaries will be all about economics. If so, he might have miscalculated. Very few voters see politics as a binary between material and moral questions. Trading one off against the other to define yourself purely as “the jobs guy” won’t work with Republicans. History shows that such a strategy can severely, even fatally, wound a candidacy.

The pledge would have committed the Republican frontrunner to appoint prolife judges, select prolife cabinet members, stop taxpayer funding for abortions and to support a ban on abortions after 20 weeks. Five of his opponents signed it, including Tea Party firebrand Michele Bachmann and libertarian Ron Paul. Bachmann observed that, “The excuses for not signing clearly continue the doubts about [Romney’s] leadership and commitment to ending the practice of abortion – particularly for a candidate who ran as prochoice for the Senate and governorship of Massachusetts.”

The pledge was flawed and Romney was probably intellectually right not to sign. Why should a pro-choice official not be appointed to a Republican cabinet? Historically, that would have denied jobs to Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Pledges achieve little in the general election and are routinely broken. Only candidates who know they are not going to win can afford to sign them. It certainly looks like the 2012 election will be mostly about jobs and the deficit, so alienating independents with this sort of thing looks like foolishness.