You have no answer to the question because there is no valid answer possible. Those who vote for Romney will have to set aside any conservative principles they may hold. Nonsense.
I have answered the question to you directly more than once and I will do so again here.
Now, I do not necessarily answer this or other simple questions asked of me by the worst Mitt-haters on this site, because the fact is there are numerous posters here that have completely abandoned reason, honesty, and decency in their single-minded campaign to prevent the GOP nominee from being elected President. They do not ask their questions in order to conduct a reasonable discussion of what is the best course of action for our country. Rather, they ask their questions insincerely in order to waste my time as punishment for my not being driven to unreason and indecency by hatred for Romney as they are.
I've said repeatedly that this debasement of the culture and the level of discussion that has taken place here on FR is, to my mind, a moral disgrace, and is also a tactical error and a squandering of this site's legacy and potential. But of course it is your site and if you are satisfied with what it has become then so be it.
Now, as I have also said repeatedly in the past, I believe Romney is neither an ideological leftist nor an across-the-board conservative.
I believe he has very few conservative accomplishments in politics because his only office was as Governor of a Democrat-dominated state. In Massachusetts he got along by going along with liberalism.
Now, the reason I support him for President now, and believe that in doing so I am not setting aside my conservative principles, is because of the circumstances of this moment. I hope that the GOP will control both houses of the next Congress and that the tea party movement will exert substantial influence on the legislation that Congress passes and sends to Pres. Romney for signature. I do not believe that a Pres. Romney will veto anything approved by the Congressional GOP caucus. Pres. Obama, by contrast, would threaten or exercise his veto and the result is that we would get less conservative legislation passed under Obama than Romney.
Case in point: Romney says he will repeal Obamacare. I believe he will. Obama will not. I oppose Obamacare, I want it repealed, and so for this reason alone I prefer Romney to Obama.
Same with energy. We need to build the Keystone pipeline and drill here, drill now. Romney says he'll do it. I believe him. Obama won't. The list goes on and on.
Note that none of this hinges on Romney being a conservative at heart. He just needs to understand how the economy works and want America to be successful. Obama does not understand the economy and wants America to fail. Preferring the former to the latter is perfectly in keeping with my conservative principles.
There are many other areas where Romney will almost certainly be better for conservative goals than Obama, and no areas where he will likely be worse.
I care about results and I think it is obvious that the results will be more conservative under Romney than under Obama. The whole anti-Romney argument is that he will get in there and suddenly abandon his conservative rhetoric, and that the Congress (even if controlled by the GOP) will then start passing leftist bills and Romney will sign them.
I think this is much less likely than the scenario I describe, but of course this is just my opinion.
Which gets us back to Free Republic. You, Jim, have chosen (whether tacitly or actively) that FR should be a site where those who hold the opinion I do should be met with utter unreason, calumny, and lies stacked upon lies. That is how this site is these days. There are scores of threads that demonstrate this and none that I have seen in months that are characterized by anything else.
Again, it's your site and your choice, but to have as a founding principle of FR, that in this, the final run-up to the most consequential election in at least thirty two years, that anyone who supports the election of the GOP nominee (and in doing so joins Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Darryl Issa, Jim DeMint, John Bolton, Robert Bork, etc., etc.), that such a person has necessarily abandoned conservatism and deserves to be met on your site with hysteria, lies, and abuse is just plain crazy, to my mind, Jim. It is not honest, it is not practical, it is not conservative, and it is not decent.
No one, least of all me (if for no other reason than because I know better) is asking you to change your opinion of Romney or your vote. But there is another issue here, which I have not yet seen you address. And that is the quality and substance of the rhetoric directed at Romney and at those here who will campaign and vote for him. The most extreme FR Romney-haters say that they are the only true conservatives here or anywhere. The plainly observable facts say otherwise, unless the definition of "true conservative" encompasses something well less than 10% of the entire American population. (And if that is the target audience here, then I think the word "grassroots" can be dropped from the FR lexicon.)
The 2010 election showed the arrival of the first truly grassroots conservative political movement of out time. Instead of seizing the moment, and building practcally on the gains of 2010, FR has allowed first the Romney nomination, and now the USSC Obamacare decision, to point us away from practical grassroots activism and toward nihilism and apocalyptic doom-mongering.
This is the least conservative option going.
(P.S. If your only response to what I've written here is, as before, to again post a link to that YouTube compilation of Romney being Romney, you can save yourself the trouble. Everyone saw that before the primaries even started, and the guy wound up getting nominated anyway.)
