• Cover Story
• Table of
  Contents
• Contents By
  Topic
• Columns
  • Brownstein
  • Cook
  • Crook
  • Rauch
  • Stokes
  • Schneider
  • Taylor Jr.
• Regular
  Features
  • Hotline Extra
  • Inside Washington
  • Insiders Poll
  • K Street Corridor
  • People
  • The Week on the Hill

For Mitt Romney, the once and likely future Republican presidential candidate, it looks like it's back to Plan A. Or maybe not.

Elected Massachusetts governor in 2002 as a practical problem solver, Romney re-created himself during the 2008 Republican presidential race as a conservative crusader determined to eliminate abortion and smite gay marriage. In the process, he jettisoned so many earlier positions that both conservatives and moderates questioned his convictions. By the time Romney returned to a Mr. Fix-It economic message, John McCain had built an insurmountable lead.

Romney has re-emerged with a recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and this week's release of a book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. In the book, Romney's tone and message generally revert to his problem-solver persona from Massachusetts -- a direction he reinforced a few days ago by criticizing the "temptations of populism." He ended his tome, however, with a bristling broadside against Democrats -- much like the one he delivered during his combative CPAC speech. Every candidate stresses different notes to different audiences. But these messages vary enough to suggest that Romney still hasn't entirely decided whether to take the pragmatist or the crusader path if he runs in 2012.

Primarily, the book presents Romney as pragmatist. He highlights his experience as a management consultant at Bain & Co., picturing himself as a kind of corporate Sherlock Holmes, who sifted through mounds of perplexing data to unearth winning strategies for troubled companies. And he identifies as his top economic goal not promoting "liberty" or slashing government, as many conservatives might, but encouraging innovation. These pages leave no question that Romney is a conservative, but he portrays his mind as more empirical than ideological. The book is more Jack Welch than Ayn Rand.

Most of Romney's thinking hugs the conservative mainstream. On foreign policy, he closely follows George W. Bush's tracks. At home, he passionately accuses unions, especially teachers unions, of impeding innovation and productivity. He wants to retrench Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor, by converting it from an entitlement into a block grant. He praises the House Republican proposal to replace Medicare as it now exists with a credit for seniors to buy private insurance. (In the book, he repeatedly praises controversial ideas like that without unequivocally endorsing them.)

Some of the book's other conclusions, though, take Romney down roads that few other 2012 Republicans may follow. Private-school vouchers, a perennial conservative priority, are mostly "politically infeasible," he writes. Likewise, the conservative call to carve out private accounts from Social Security; instead, Romney backs voluntary "add-on" accounts more like those that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama proposed. He complains that Republicans are "overly fond" of bashing federal regulation. Someone may have to pass Thomas Donohue, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce domo, smelling salts after that.

Romney's competing impulses are most apparent when he discusses energy. Although he squirms and hedges, he concludes that climate change is real and is affected by human activity. He praises federal energy regulation for squeezing more efficiency from cars and home appliances. And Romney says that increased domestic production, although worthwhile, wouldn't "appreciably" reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

He returns to the conservative fold to reject a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions. But his alternative may still raise eyebrows. Romney suggests (again without committing) that a "tax swap" would be "the best" way to reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption. Under that idea, Washington would tax carbon emissions and institute an offsetting cut in "another tax, such as the payroll tax." That idea's other proponents include former Vice President Gore.

Romney's natural audience is center-right voters who want to restrain and reform government, not raze it. But today, the conservative coalition's most militant elements are ascendant. So he is offering the first group generally nuanced policy and the second incendiary rhetoric, such as his CPAC denunciations of liberal "neo-monarchists" threatening to "kill the very spirit that has built the nation." He seems determined to simultaneously convey that he is reasonable and angry. Reasonable suits Romney better, and yet now, as in 2008, he appears uncertain that he can capture the GOP's heart while wearing the clothes that fit him best.