The Problem with Mitt Romney

In a single paragraph, Steve Hayward nails the main problem with Mitt Romney.  Here is Hayward:

The real problem, as I size it up, is that Romney doesn’t perceive—and doesn’t match up to—our present constitutional moment, in which basic questions about the size and nature of government are salient in ways they haven’t been for decades.  Romney’s stubborn defense of the individual mandate “for Massachusetts” suggests he doesn’t get it.  I had a conversation a year ago with a very prominent person close to Romney (who shall go unnamed since it was a private conversation) who said to me that she didn’t understand why conservatives were so opposed to the individual mandate.  I allowed as how I understood the policy logic of it, but thought that it was simply unconstitutional—an abuse of the proper limits of government power.  This produced only a dumbfounded look from my Romneyite interlocutor.  My suggested path for Romney to back away from the individual mandate without doing himself flip-flopping damage was met with further puzzlement.

This may be, along with Dr. Paul Rahe's critiques, the single best paragraph written on Romney's problem and why conservatives, who were open to him in 2008, are in droves flocking to different canidates every few weeks or so.