Romney changes with the wind. In liberal MA he acted the left of center part. In a national office of presidency, my instinct is he will act right of center, where the country is. He is smart enough to realize he has no need to go left.
If that’s true, I would expect him to go along with a Republican Congress if elected but also to flip and go along with a Democrat Congress if they win back control in 2014. In that sense he would be like the Republican Clinton. Again, my fear is not so much that Romney would be worse than Obama in the next 4 years, but that he would give us that squishy moderate Republican type of presidency we had in 1988-1992 and 2004-2008 that paves the way for a big Democrat takeover. If that happened, they’d have a Democrat Congress by that time, whereas if Obama beat Romney, we might be able to retain gridlock for 4 years and then try again for the presidency.
I also worry that he would actually be popular as a liberal/moderate bigger-government/socially liberal type which would severely damage the position of conservatives within the Republican party. If he swung to the hardline right and stayed there I wouldn’t have a problem with him. That’s just so implausible given that on knee-jerk issues that he probably wasn’t advised on specifically like the minimum wage question and the Augusta question, his natural impulses come on and are completely liberal. And we know who the type of advisors that the GOP assigns to their candidates are, e.g. Nicole Wallace who end up voting Democrat if the GOP ticket turns out too conservative for them. Or of course Romney’s advisor John Sununu who also advised Bush, Sr. to raise taxes and appoint David Souter.