Romney on abortion/ "flip flopping" and what it really means.

If anything, this is something Romney can say that he has been consistent on.  He hasn't changed his position on this issue from the beginning of this campaign all the way to the end.  I saw a bit today on MSNBC about Romney supposedly being a "flip flopper" when it came to the issue of abortion, and it just made me laugh more than anything.

I don't think that any candidate has ever been completely consistent from one end of an election to another.  In today's campaign environment, it's almost impossible for someone to be completely the same when it comes to policy throughout the entire process.

A candidate essentially has to run two separate campaigns: one for the primary when they polarize as much as possible without going off the deep end and sounding crazy so that they can win over the people that are actually going to go vote in a primary election (which would be the more polarized members of the electorate), and then one for the general election where they have to move back toward the middle to try and win the swing voters in the more important states.

This is a sad fact because it often means that the candidates have to change their viewpoints and what they say about certain policy over the course of the year due to the extreme cases in the primaries and the more moderate ones in the general election debates.

It's just sad that the majority of the public doesn't understand this fact, so when they see on TV or read online somewhere that Romney or Obama changed their stance on something, they think that that candidate cannot be trusted and must not be a dependable person.  In reality, they're just playing the game that they are being forced to play to win votes and hopefully get elected into office.

Finally, I think that we have to consider that candidates are at their core HUMAN BEINGS.  They too have experiences and encounters that change their viewpoints on certain things and can influence their worldview.  If you have something happen to you that is a major event in your life, it usually changes your view of the world in that area, whatever that may be.  If we begin to think of candidates of humans instead of just political robots, we start to see that changing viewpoints and stances might not be something that has to do with integrity or trustworthiness, but might actually be attributed to the fact that they could have a soul.