The Democratic National Committee put out this attack ad on Mitt Romney this week. It covers how Mitt Romney has changed positions (180 degrees) on a great number of highly charged political issues. When Mitt ran in 2008 for the Republican nomination he was accussed, particularly by John McCain, of being a flip flopper. If Romney does turn out to the Republican nominee (which is by no means a sure thing) I wonder whether he could be categorized as the first completely post-ideological candidate.
The excellent documentary The Century of the Self covers the way modern media has influenced politics. This is covered in Part 4 of the documentary here:
That episode covers the rise of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and their post-partisan media images. Clinton said that the "era of big government was over", Blair had his 3rd Way. Since then we have seen the same things from the right: e.g. David Cameron's and George Bush's use of compassionate conservatism. Barack Obama's neither red state nor blue state but the United States of America vision fits precisely within this framework as well.
Now while all of those politicians had post-partisan political messages they all still held some core committment to the politics of the democratic left or right. Clinton in his first term tried to create national healthcare in the US, George Bush pushed for tax cuts for the rich and wars abroard, Cameron has pushed austerity measures, while Obama did sign into law healthcare reform (and also pushed for immigration reform as well as a cap and trade environmental policy).
But Romney seems to be another thing entirely. While all the other politicians named are post-partisan in certain ways, they were by no means post-ideological. With Mitt the only common threads seem to be Mitt Romney wanting to have power. And I suppose some sense of corporate or business interests. But beyond that it is really unclear what actual political perspective Mitt has continuously held--in a way that all the others named can be reasonably be understood to have maintained throughout the various contexts of their political work.
When Mitt was governor of Massachusetts, he was a Rockefeller Republican (or moderate/"left-wing" republican) because that was the only way he could win. Now he is running on an anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, Obama-hating hardline campaign because he is running in the Republican primary. If he wins the nomination, he will a more centrist campaign for the general election. And if he were to win the election in 2012, then he would govern (I guess) depending on how the breakdown of Congress pans out. So I'm not sure the "real" Mitt was the governor Mitt and now he's gone over to the dark side. I wonder whether there is a real Mitt at all--in terms of political ideology--or whether he is simply political ambition incarnate to its maximal, (il)logical end point.
