Temperature check: Is Barack Obama preferable to Mitt Romney?

Santorum – yesterday:

SAN ANTONIO, Texas – Rick Santorum played off of the Mitt Romney campaign’s Etch A Sketch gaffe today when he told an audience that the country might be better off with President Obama than with a candidate who will shift his positions with ease and who he believes is not very different from the president.

β€œYou win by giving people a choice. You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you’re going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future,” Santorum told a crowd at USAA.

I’m with Michelle Malkin on this one. The answer to the question is: no. But let me emphasize it a little more: Not no, but hell no. Β While I suspect that Santorum’s point was more geared to independents and undecideds who may be leaning towards Romney, there’s a better way to get your point across about Mitt Romney being a career political chameleon without essentially suggesting it would be better to leave Obama in office than elect Mitt Romney.

I say this, of course, being one of the more vocal “anti-Mitts” out there. Β I don’t like the guy, don’t trust him one single bit, and doubt I will ever be “pro-Mitt” – even if I do end up having to hold my nose and vote for him in the general election over Barack Obama. Β But leaving Obama in office IS NOT PREFERABLE to Mitt Romney.

Having said that, my gut feeling is that if Romney is elected and becomes the “face” of the GOP, the fight to win people over to conservatism becomes that much harder – because if he becomes the GOP “brand” being the moderate to liberal he is on most issues, my worry is that people who don’t follow politics closely will wrongly associate “conservatism” with Mitt Romney courtesy of deliberate misrepresentation of him by liberals as “conservative”, and any actual conservative candidates/politicos who don’t fall in line with that type of pseudo-“conservatism” (the type we see often in the North East) could end up losing out in the end – and as a result, conservatism will lose.

Your thoughts?

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