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"  Tom Ridge and I were getting along so well. He&amp;#039;d come early to the spin room after last night&amp;#039;s debate and we&amp;#039;d chatted about John Jones, the federal judge in Harrisburg who is a friend of Ridge&amp;#039;s, and who also authored the opinion squashing the attempt of various god-enfeebled folks to teach &amp;quot;intelligent design&amp;quot; in the schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. (In his decision, Jones memorably referred to the case brought by the Bible-banging side as &amp;quot;breathtaking inanity.&amp;quot;) Then, I asked Ridge a question he didn&amp;#039;t much want to answer. All night, the president had been battering Willard Romney for positions Romney had had to take in order to win the Republican nomination for president. Because of the nature of the Republican primary electorate, Romney had gone zooming off to the right, especially on issues relating to ladyparts and the ladies who have them. Now, of course, he&amp;#039;s trying to revive the previous con that had helped him get elected governor of Massachusetts. (He&amp;#039;s even got a new ad out, smack off the end of the debate, about how his position on reproductive freedom isn&amp;#039;t anywhere near that of that crazy Mormon bastard who was yapping up there in all those Republican debates.) The president even had the audacity to compare Romney&amp;#039;s record on these issues unfavorably to that noted champion of progressive social causes, George W. Bush. So, I wondered, didn&amp;#039;t Ridge \u2014 who is the living Encyclopedia Politica entry under &amp;quot;Endangered Republican Moderate,&amp;quot; and has been for over a decade \u2014 feel that, for the foreseeable future, every Republican nominee is going to have to take positions to get nominated that will be used to beat him over the head within the general direction? Isn&amp;#039;t his party chained to the Etch-A-Sketch for the next couple of decades, on these issues, especially? This was Ridge&amp;#039;s first attempt at an answer: &amp;quot;Well, let me tell you this, this is about the presidential debate tonight, not to sidestep your question,&amp;quot; he replied, sidestepping my question. &amp;quot;The end of the day, the primary responsibility for pulling the country together belongs to the president. This is not a president who chose from day one to try and bring people together. Regardless of what he said tonight, you ask House or Senate leadership on our side of the aisle how engaged they were. Not terribly engaged at all. I think it was a year, year-and-a-half before he even invited Mitch McConnell down. So, at the end of the day, if we&amp;#039;re going to talk about bipartisanship, it has to start with the president. People have forgotten that, as president, he had the House and the Senate for two years. Today, in this debate, he&amp;#039;s talking about a comprehensive strategy on deficit reduction, on energy, on immigration. You&amp;#039;ve been president for four years. You controlled both chambers of Congress for two of the four, and you haven&amp;#039;t done anything. So I don&amp;#039;t think Americans look at four years of somebody&amp;#039;s on-the-job training.&amp;quot; Then he started talking about Benghazi and what the president said. This was an answer to somebody&amp;#039;s question, but not mine. So I tried again. &amp;quot;I think candidates are going to have to decide in the primaries how they&amp;#039;re going to deal with issues and deal with them if they survive the primary and get to the general election,&amp;quot; Ridge said. &amp;quot;I think at the end of the day, Americans are really interested in a president who can solve the problems regardless of what they said in the primary or what they say in the general election. At the end of the day, candidates on both sides of the aisle are going to have to decide what they are going to say in all phases in the election. There were some differences of opinion, even differences of opinion as to what Governor Romney had said before. Governor Romney had to remind President Obama that he took a few of those things out of context.&amp;quot; Oh, Lord. Out Of Context. Known to all sportswriters as The Roger Clemens Gambit. &amp;quot;What you see is that kowtowing to the Tea Party wing of the Republican party,&amp;quot; said Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen. We saw it in Mitt Romney on immigration. He just called for &amp;#039;self-deportation.&amp;#039; You see it in his position on defunding Planned Parenthood. Mitt Romney&amp;#039;s policies on the economy are virtually identical to George W. Bush&amp;#039;s, while, on social policies, he&amp;#039;s to the right of George Bush on these issues. Mitt Romney has now become a right-wing Tea Party candidate. Those are the positions he took in the primary and, if he&amp;#039;s elected president, as the president pointed out, he will keep those promises because he is now tied to the Tea Party House of Representatives and you can be sure that they will hold him to the promises he&amp;#039;s made to them.&amp;quot; (I, for one, think Romney could have been nominated even without going into the tank as deeply as he did. The Republican primary field was a cracker factory, and he had enough money to crush all the other candidates en echelon. He might have been the guy who defied the Etch-A-Sketch. I am pretty much alone in this opinion. Were they honestly going to nominate Rick Santorum and lose 48 states? Van Hollen scoffed at the idea and, of course, no Republican even will admit to the problem.) The fact is that the Republicans will continue to force ideological schizophrenia on their candidates for as long as the rest of the country lets the party get away with it, and the primary vehicle for closing down the Etch-A-Sketch is the Democratic party, which has to do a better job at making people like Willard Romney own the dynamic until it ultimately destroys them. The president made a decent stab at it last night. &amp;quot;I know George W. Bush and you, governor, are no George W. Bush,&amp;quot; is about the nastiest thing that can be said about any American politician. I mean, honestly, where did our civility go? ON THE DEBATE: America Has Now Met the Many Romneys, and America Knows They Can Get Their Asses Kicked "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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