Extremism in the defense of power

There's a reason EJ Dionne is one of my role models. He reinforces it consistently each Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  

Dionne lays it down again this morning, with a typically thoughtful take on Mitt Romney's big moment at the Republican convention in Tampa, coming this week.  He writes about the central irony mentioned often in the 2012 presidential campaign - that Mitt Romney eschewed the liberalism and principles of his late father, Michigan Gov. George Romney, yet fulfilled his father's legacy by winning the Republican presidential nomination, a quest his father sought and failed to complete. 

But Dionne frames it about how the modern Republican party now represents pretty much everything that George Romney abhorred, so much so that Romney the elder walked out of the 1964 presidential nomination rather than compromise his principles on the issue of equal rights for African Americans.  But the opposition forces, led by Ariz. Sen. Barry Goldwater, are having the last laugh: 

This week, 48 years on, Mitt Romney is set to achieve what his father never could. But his great family triumph will not represent a vindication of his father’s principles. Mitt Romney reached the summit not by battling the GOP’s staunchest conservatives but by accommodating them. Nothing better captures the absolute victory of the forces of Goldwaterism than a Romney triumph on the basis of Goldwater’s ideas.

Ideas that his son - using welfare, voting rights and even President Obama's birth certificate, all hot-button,racially tinged issues - has fully embraced to reach the conservative mountaintop.

Whoever said the apple doesn't fall far from the tree never met Mitt.