I don't know who these trusted conservatives are, nor do I doubt your characterization of them. But I do doubt that they have a special ability to detect deception simply because they are known and trusted.
My sense of Romney (who I respected enormously at the start of the campaign) is that his positions are not particularly sincere, but rather market-tested. Every one seems tailor-made to what conservatives want to hear, regardless of what he has said previously. (The exception is his supposed support for keeping the Dept of Education, which would never be a dealbreaker).
This phoniness would doom his candidacy in the general election.
But why do you have conservative principles? I presume because you have weighed the varying positions, and found the conservative ones to be the best. You may have even tried other principles and found them lacking.
Your objection is somewhat akin to the school system from that movie “stand and deliver”. The kids got most of the answers right, and the school decided that since they had always been flunking, they must have cheated to get the same answers.
But in the end, it turns out that they got the right answers because someone finally showed them the value of doing right, and they answered the same because it was the right answer.
I actually disagree that every one of his positions is right on. Conservatives don’t have a right on. He isn’t pure on the 2nd amendment. He isn’t quite right on free trade. He has doubts but doesn’t discount global warming.
But to the degree he has adopted our position, why can’t it be because our position is right? It’s not like he wasn’t already on out side on most of the issues, even in 1994. There were only a couple issues he was deftly against us. One is an issue that I see people turn on a dime with — abortion. It’s really a yes-no issue, so it’s simply to one day realise you were wrong.
We’ve seen girls sure to have an abortion, and in one meeting, boom, they change their mind, they are pro-life, they go off and have their child. Confronted with reality, smart people make the right choice.
The gay issue I think he’s in the mainstream of conservative thought, but he’s “liberal” to the more ardent social conservatives, of which I’m otherwise a part except I’m not as dogmatic about public policy of gays (I personally oppose homosexuality as immoral, as sin, as perverted, as unnatural).
But he’d lose no support if he said “I was wrong about accepting gays”, and yet he doesn’t say that, because it’s how he really thinks.
I agree, people can be fooled. But he’d have to fool a lot of people. And frankly, we’ve been fooled by others who we were certain were conservative, and maybe they were but somewhere they got corrupted.
But at this point, we are not talking about abandoning a good conservative for a crap-shoot. We are talking about either voting for a known half-conservative who probably can’t win the election, or picking a solid conservative platform of a man who at worst might be lying about a few of the social planks for which little can be done anyway.
I think that’s an easy bet. It’s like “I’ll give you $10, or else you can take this box which has a $20 bill stuck to it, and might have another $20 inside or not”. The fool says “Well, the $10 is a sure thing, and we don’t know if the box is worth $40 or not — but we KNOW the box is better than the $10 check, and the other $20 at this point is a pleasant extra.
I understand people not voting for a half-conservative because it “compromises their principles”, and “sends a message we don’t care about conservative values”.
But in this case, McCain wins with or without our support. McCain will win WITHOUT conservatives, and will “prove” that you can ignore conservatives and win the nomination.
And meanwhile, people will look at Romney’s platform, see him lose, and the next time around, NONE of our candidates will have a conservative platform — since it was rejected by the voters.
There’s no loss of “principle” in voting for Romney, because he is running on conservative values. If it turns out he lied, we have been fooled, but everybody will know he only won because he SAID he was a conservative, and next time around we’ll have conservatives, REAL ones, willing to run knowing that we will be able to get them the nomination.