"If you were elected president, how many first ladies could we expect?"

The New Yorker has a profile of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the Oct. 29 issue. New Yorker profiles of Republican politicians tend to be rather relentless, and this is no exception. It makes Romney, who is a very smart man, appear to be a foolish victim of his training as both a businessman and a Mormon; the two things have undoubtedly contributed to his success, but the author undercuts him repeatedly by showing how he sometimes acts foolishly with constituents based on strategies that really work better in business management than in politics. The article, of course, addresses the flip-flop issue, highlighting Romney's over-zealous advocacy of positions to which he is a recent convert, a quality, the author suggests at the end, that might be his downfall.

(The following excerpt isn't from the end of the article, but it paints a good picture of Romney. Also, the title of this post is a quote from a someone who questioned Romney at a forum -- it's just too funny to leave out.)

Politicians tend to pander, especially during the primary season. Romney’s chief opponent, Rudy Giuliani, also has a history as a pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights Republican. But while Giuliani simply downplays his record on those issues, Romney sells himself as a true convert. He not only shifts positions; he often claims to be the most passionate advocate of his new stances. It’s one of the reasons that his metamorphosis from liberal Republican to committed right-winger seems so jarring. In 1994, in his race for the Senate, he didn’t simply argue that he was a defender of gay rights; he claimed to be a stronger advocate than his opponent, Edward Kennedy. Today, he’s not just a faithful conservative but the only Republican candidate who represents “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” He brings a salesman’s bravado and certainty to issues. At a debate in May, when asked how he would respond to a hypothetical situation involving the interrogation of a terrorist at Guantánamo Bay, he said, “Some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo. My view is that we ought to double Guantánamo.” Elected as a pro-choice governor in 2002—YouTube is flooded with his passionate advocacy of abortion rights—he now presents himself as the most resolute anti-abortion candidate in the Republican field. A Mormon, he sometimes adopts the religious language of Evangelicals when he is addressing conservative Christian groups. To economic conservatives, he pitches himself as the candidate most strongly committed to slashing spending and taxes. (He’s the only major G.O.P. candidate to have signed a formal anti-tax pledge, the sort of move that his spokesman dismissed as “government by gimmickry” in Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign.) To national-security conservatives, he is the most hawkish. (He says often that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of Iran, should be indicted under the Genocide Convention, and his campaign has named the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, the vice-chairman of Blackwater, as an adviser.) But, while giving customers exactly what they want may be normal in the corporate world, it can be costly in politics.

Iowa and New Hampshire polls: the only ones that matter?

While people put so much clout in national polls leading up to primaries, that logic really makes little sense since there is no national primary. The states with the earliest primaries (Iowa and New Hampshire) are arguably the only ones that really matter, because that is what sets the tone for the rest of the states. After all this talk of national polls, here is an AP poll that we can actually use -- a poll of New Hampshire voters.

The Numbers - Democrats
Hillary Rodham Clinton Barack Obama John Edwards Bill Richardson	43 percent 22 percent 14 percent 6 percent
The Numbers - Republicans
Mitt Ronmey Rudy Giuliani John McCain Ron Paul Mike Huckabee Fred Thompson	32 percent 22 percent 15 percent 7 percent 6 percent 5 percent