The dock and the boat

Mitt Romney can be described as a man stepping off of a dock onto a boat. While he's still got one foot on the dock, and one on the boat, the boat starts to slip away from the dock, farther and farther as the man's legs are stretched wider and wider.

In Mitt's case, the dock is decided voters (the GOP base), and the boat is undecided voters. Mitt can't be too true to the base, or the undecided voters will start drifting away. And he can't court the undecided voters too much, or the base will either complain to the media, or the right-wing media will complain in behalf of the base, in which case the man's foot on the boat is basically pushing it away from the dock.

Either way, the candidate is in constant peril of going into the water. And that is even before the tax returns surface (which they will), or madness breaks loose between Southern California and the Middle East, whizzing past Mitt's brain en route.

Madness? Muslim-hating extremists in the L.A. area create a crude movie slamming Islam and Islam's Prophet Muhammad for the purpose of provoking Muslim extremists, which is essentially extremists lighting and waving a burning torch in the face of extremists who wear their religion like gasoline.

The Cairo U.S. Embassy, recognizing full well this dynamic and its potential for violence, issues a statement saying it "condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims."

Mitt issues a quick reply to this statement in a way that draws fire from his own allies, who say he went off half-cocked. In a subsequent press conference, he is asked: "Some people are saying you jumped the gun a little in putting that statement out last night and that you should have waited until more details were available."

Mitt replies: "I don't think we ever hesitate when we see something which is a violation of our principles." To what principles is he referring? Let's choose "accuracy." If he was moved not to hesitate, it must mean he doesn't consider accuracy a principle. Or if he actually does consider accuracy a principle, and he violated it in his unwillingness to hesitate, it must mean that he chose politics over principle.

You see the kind of agonizing that a man lets himself in for, when he has one foot on the dock, and one foot on the boat.