From Red Meat To Arugula

The wise old GOP groundhogs crawl out of their burrows, scratch their eyes, and advise the candidate who just spent a long winter beating seven conservative challengers please to tone it down and wax positive and constructive for the general election. Everyone knows Mitt Romney can't win without a move to the center. And yet Michael Barbaro reports in the New York Times:

The campaign shows no immediate sign of shifting from attack mode, precisely the approach some supporters want him to maintain. Terry Branstad, the Republican governor of Iowa, said Mr. Obama was the candidate running the negative campaign. “He is spending his time personally attacking Romney,” said Mr. Branstad, who encouraged Mr. Romney to keep highlighting the president’s shortcomings. 

I've always had the feeling that Romney's over-aggressiveness toward Barack Obama was an attempt to obscure their glaring similarities. They're smart and temperamentally reserved, and they're both pragmatists, at least if you go by Romney's record as Massachusetts governor, which is not unlike Obama's as president. Since Romney couldn't very well proclaim his conservative bona fides, he compensated with extra servings of red meat. His campaign may be delaying the big reveal of its general election strategy because it knows conservatives won't like what they're served instead.

"I'd Get On The Phone To Bibi"

Michael Barbaro examines the friendship between the likely GOP nominee and Israel's prime minister, who worked together as business consultants in Boston in the mid-1970s:

Mr. Romney has suggested that he would not make any significant policy decisions about Israel without consulting Mr. Netanyahu — a level of deference that could raise eyebrows given Mr. Netanyahu’s polarizing reputation, even as it appeals to the neoconservatives and evangelical Christians who are fiercely protective of Israel.

In a telling exchange during a debate in December, Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Gingrich for making a disparaging remark about Palestinians, declaring: “Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?’ “

Martin S. Indyk, a United States ambassador to Israel in the Clinton administration, said that whether intentional or not, Mr. Romney’s statement implied that he would “subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.”

“That, of course, would be inappropriate,” he added.