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The point is that Romney is trying to sell himself as the candidate for social conservatives and therefore the bar is set higher for him on social issues. He doesn't have the experience, name recognition, or national security credentials of McCain or Giuliani, so his path to the nomination is to portray himself as a true social conservative. Given that this has been the primary argument for his candidacy, he opens himself up to criticism of his past contradictory stances. And also, as James pointed out, it's not just a matter of him once being pro-choice and now being pro-life. In 1994, he ran for Senate in Massachusetts on being pro-choice, when he was in Utah in 2001 he rejected the pro-choice label, but when running for governor in 2002, he went back to being pro-choice again, only to end up as a born again pro-lifer in time to run for president as the socially conservative candidate. Yes, perhaps Romney is being sincere now, perhaps he isn't. We'll never know. But all we do know from his 12 year public record is that he has a history of taking positions on social issues that correspond exactly with what is most politically expedient at the time. In 2004, one of the primary arguments conservatives made against a John Kerry presidency was that he couldn't be trusted as a wartime leader because of his shifting positions on Iraq. And yet now Ramesh Ponnuru is arguing that social conservatives should give Romney the benefit of the doubt, despite his shifting stances on issues that matter to them. 

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