Andrew Sullivan makes an interesting pitch for Romney here, in which he sees the man's transparent willingness to pander to literally anyone as a plus, and that it will make him more able to pivot on Iraq and other things. In the interest of full disclosure, Sullivan loathes Romney and acknowledges that he is an obvious panderer and fraud. Still, this is a notion that should be discussed, and it has a sort of perverse merit to it.
I don't agree, though, with the notion that if Romney wins it will be in spite of Christian evangelicals, rather than because of them. He is hardly running a centrist campaign, and although he might be more inclined to compromising with Democrats than, say, Rudy Giuliani, Democrats are not going to be nearly as inclined to work with him, and thus we have a new incarnation of the Jimmy Carter presidency. This assumes Democrats stay in control of Congress. If not, of course Romney is going to pursue a conservative policy agenda--that's what the Republican base is going to want, and if he doesn't do their bidding, he immediately becomes a target to become the first sitting president defeated for renomination by his own party since...Chester Alan Arthur, I think. In that eventuality, I think Romney begins to look more like a Prime Minister than President, as his support among the conservative rank-and-file will always be tenuous, and conservatives on the Hill will sense an opportunity to reassert their power after years of being muzzled by Bush. Evangelicals aren't just going to forget about Romney's past--for example, they're not going to forget his promise to be more liberal on gay rights than Ted Kennedy in 1994.
Ultimately, the old truism is that the devil you know beats the devil you don't. I have no idea what a Romney administration might be like, but I hope I don't have to find out.
