Should Conservatives Rally to Romney?

Mark Levin says yes:

I don’t pretend to speak for President Reagan or all conservatives. I speak for myself. But I watched the Republican debate last night, which was held at the Reagan library, and I have to say that I fear a McCain candidacy. He would be an exceedingly poor choice as the Republican nominee for president.

Let’s get the largely unspoken part of this out the way first. McCain is an intemperate, stubborn individual, much like Hillary Clinton. These are not good qualities to have in a president. As I watched him last night, I could see his personal contempt for Mitt Romney roiling under the surface. And why? Because Romney ran campaign ads that challenged McCain’s record? Is this the first campaign in which an opponent has run ads questioning another candidate’s record? That’s par for the course. To the best of my knowledge, Romney’s ads have not been personal. He has not even mentioned the Keating-Five to counter McCain's cheap shots. But the same cannot be said of McCain’s comments about Romney.

Last night McCain, who is the putative frontrunner, resorted to a barrage of personal assaults on Romney that reflect more on the man making them than the target of the attacks. McCain now has a habit of describing Romney as a “manager for profit” and someone who has “laid-off” people, implying that Romney is both unpatriotic and uncaring. Moreover, he complains that Romney is using his “millions” or “fortune” to underwrite his campaign. This is a crass appeal to class warfare. McCain is extremely wealthy through marriage. Romney has never denigrated McCain for his wealth or the manner in which he acquired it. Evidently Romney’s character doesn’t let him to cross certain boundaries of decorum and decency, but McCain’s does. And what of managing for profit? When did free enterprise become evil? This is liberal pablum which, once again, could have been uttered by Hillary Clinton.

And there is the open secret of McCain losing control of his temper and behaving in a highly inappropriate fashion with prominent Republicans, including Thad Cochran, John Cornyn, Strom Thurmond, Donald Rumsfeld, Bradley Smith, and a list of others. Does anyone honestly believe that the Clintons or the Democrat party would give McCain a pass on this kind of behavior?

Read the rest of it here. Steve Kornacki has a different view:

But for all of Romney’s griping, there is a certain justice in his campaign being sullied by such a disingenuous gambit. Romney, after all, has built his entire campaign on disingenuousness, wrapping himself in a language and ideology that he once told Massachusetts voters repulsed him.

More than that, he has shown remarkably little restraint in taking his newfound, base-friendly views and spending millions of dollars to advertise them. His chief target, for nearly a year now, has been McCain.

It was Romney who just two years ago matter-of-factly told the Massachusetts press that McCain’s views on immigration were “reasonable” and that the Arizonan’s call for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers was “not amnesty.” Then he discovered that conservative activists were livid with McCain—the same activists whose support Romney badly wanted for his presidential bid. So he reversed himself, began spouting nativist rhetoric, and slammed McCain—in debates, speeches, interviews and television and radio ads—for supporting “amnesty.”

Meanwhile, it was McCain who stood by his position, at enormous political peril, urging a “humane” solution to the immigration morass and acknowledging that illegal immigrants “are God’s children” too. Right or wrong, McCain handled the issue honorably.

That’s just one example of the shameless opportunism that has defined Romney’s effort. In Massachusetts he brought audiences to tears with the story of a “close family member” who died from a back alley abortion, and how the experience had convinced him that abortion should be a matter of deeply personal choice, and not any business of the government’s. “You will not see me waver on that,” he declared.

But then he decided to run for President and declared himself adamantly pro-life, claiming that he had only been “effectively pro-choice” back in Massachusetts (whatever that means). McCain, meanwhile, has opposed legal abortion throughout his entire public career. Again, right or wrong, he has been consistent.

I predict a very uninspired GOP electorate in November, and that will mean a Democrat president in 2009.