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Cleveland Plain Dealer
More steps forward than back in GOP platform
By Kevin O'Brien
Thursday, August 23, 2012 

The battle between Mitt Romney and conservatives is joined. This is a healthy thing for Mitt Romney and the country. 

It's likely to be a little unnerving at times for Romney, who is trying on a brand of conservatism not native to Massachusetts. And it's likely to be frustrating at times for conservatives, because they're not going to convince the Republican standard-bearer of their righteousness in every case, nor will they win every battle. 

With this week's drafting of the 2012 platform, however, the conservative influences that have set out to turn the Republican Party into a serious option for Americans concerned about the future of the country have done pretty well. 

Should Romney win November's election, he won't be any more bound by the platform than any other president of any party ever has been. He'll play his hand his way, as a president must. Platforms obviously cannot anticipate every critical event that shapes a presidency, and no one would want a president to be limited in how he can react to unforeseen developments. 

Still, conservatives should expect Romney to require fairly constant reminders from the right to stay on course. 

The friendly pushing and pulling will begin in earnest on Monday at the convention, with the adoption of a platform that seems somewhat more congenial to the grass-roots convention delegates' outlooks than to the desires of the party establishment or the presidential candidate. 

And the persuasion must continue. Conservatives simply cannot give Romney the elbowroom George W. Bush enjoyed on a host of issues -- especially in the fiscal realm. 

Judging by large portions of the platform, so far so good. 

The Democrats, ever in search of distractions to take Americans' minds off of President Barack Obama's dismal performance, are "squealing like pigs" -- to quote the ever-restrained Vice President Joe Biden -- about an anti-abortion plank that has been around for 12 years. This item of GOP boilerplate would go further to protect unborn children than Romney would. 

No matter. The chances of someone ever sliding a bill onto President Romney's desk to put in motion a proposed constitutional amendment to end abortion on demand and get rid of the morning-after pill are about as great as Curiosity snapping a photo of a Martian waving hello. 

It's a traditional GOP grand gesture: bold, sweeping and, for the foreseeable future, unattainable. 

Other planks show the leavening influence of the Tea Party movement and its indispensable drive toward restoring constitutional government and even an item or two from the shopping list of the GOP's loosest cannon, Ron Paul. 

Tea Party-led efforts based on the 10th Amendment to return the states to their proper constitutional role as a check on federal power and reach -- a lofty, laudable goal -- get a favorable mention… 

Read the rest of the article at the Cleveland Plain Dealer


 
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