The American Spectator

p>To carry Mr. Lord’s analogy further — the man who looks at data only would probably decide not to have children, or only one or two. It is debatable that the costs outweigh the benefits. The odds of having one or more children cause you real, long-term grief are considerable, especially as the number of children increases. Yet Mitt Romney had five. br> — Rob Madsen br> Orem, Utah /p>

Please thank Mr. Lord for his great article discussing Romney. I would like to see similar articles on the other candidates, but I am not sure that they have given us enough information to do so. It would be useful though to get them to state their guiding philosophies and to ask them how that philosophy affected their pasts as well as their campaign proposals.

I slowly came to the same opinion concerning Romney as has Mr. Lord. At first I wondered why Romney was unable to communicate his conversion to being Pro-Life. I surely think that anybody who took as much heat on his changes as Romney has, and not flinch, would have truly changed, but he couldn’t connect to communicate that change. There might be some merit in enumerating all his changes and placing them in the perspective of what his most recent goal is, but it is a rarity to see someone withstand such abuse for something they are not serious about.

But surely he needs to be able to communicate well to be as successful as he has been in politics, the Olympics, and business. So I watched him on C-SPAN. Gradually it appeared that he might be out of touch. That he is just from a much higher class strata than most of us. That might in part explain why so many wonder if he is too slick, but it doesn’t explain everything. As a Mormon, I can assure you that it is not because he is using innate Mormon lingo. The only things I have seen with that aspect are the “This is the place” ad that won his contest and his tendency to close chats with emotional stories for impact, as in “Firesides.”

Meanwhile I was still wondering why he wasn’t able to put down all the charges of flip-flopping. Slowly it dawned on me that there was a deeper conflict. The vaunted experience that he is selling is that he can come in, look at a problem without bias, and use guidance from experts to craft better solutions. He is selling himself as a conservative candidate of the Open Mind. His conversions are examples of how his open mind can come to the right conclusion, and not conversions to the right principles. To be fair, he probably used the right principles in making the decision. But it has become clear to me that this is the part that is missing from his conversion story on all his flip-flops.

His freedom of religion talk was great. These were true principles. If he could outline the other principles that he would use to guide his decisions, then I doubt we would worry so much about his flip-flops. Instead, I get the feeling that his Open Mind leaves him adrift at the mercy of the prevailing winds. This scares me. Presidents can be isolated and controlled. The man that controls access to Romney will control which voices are used in making decisions. He has already shown that he can be swayed by the biased presentations of media and society until he has to make a decision and looks deeper into a subject. And Presidents are very busy. Even with free access he might not have the time to look deeper and just go with the flow.

Reagan was demonized as an ideologue and a simpleton. In reality he had clearly thought things through and decided long before he ran on right and wrong, and what principles should guide his decisions. He had also thought through many of those decisions in advance. This was all internalized and he had developed a great ability to communicate these things. And thus he accomplished great things.

p>Maybe Romney’s advisors can read these things and help him to communicate his principles. If not, let us quote Thomas Sowell, “the purpose of an open mind is to close it.” And there is not much time left for us to close our minds for or against Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for President. br> — James Bailey /p>