Things get even worse for Mitt when you look at state polls against the Democratic contenders. Romney, like Giuliani, has been touting himself as a candidate who can give the Democrats problems in 2008 because he can compete with them in the blue states. However, for that strategy to work, the candidate has to be able to hold red states against a liberal Democratic nominee while he tries to bring more blue states into the fold. Rudy Giuliani, at least at this early point, has poll numbers that indicate he might be able to pull it off. Romney doesn't.

In fact, his numbers are much worse than those of Fred Thompson or Rudy Giuliani. How much worse? He actually ties Hillary in Kentucky and loses to her in Kansas and Oklahoma.

If the GOP has to struggle in 2008 to even hang onto red states like Kentucky, Kansas, and Oklahoma, we might as well just give up on retaining the presidency right now.

It's very difficult for Mitt's opponents to point out particular ideological positions of his that they have a problem with because he doesn't seem to have any firm ideological positions. You get the feeling that almost every position he holds today might change based on what office he's running for, what the polls say next week, or what audience he's talking to today.

While a little pandering to conservatives isn't such a bad thing or out of the ordinary -- all the candidates have done it to one extent or another -- Mitt has taken flip-floppery to positively Kerryian levels.

When Mitt ran against Ted Kennedy in 1994, he came across as a squishy RINO of the sort that you typically expect to be running for office in states like Massachusetts. Yet today, he sounds like a cross between Newt Gingrich circa 1994 and Rush Limbaugh. Did Mitt have a road-to-Damascus conversion to conservatism during that relatively short period of time or is he just pretending that he did to sucker conservatives into voting for him? The problem is that it's impossible to really know. The idea, I suppose, is that conservatives should get him into the White House and then we'll find out where he really stands.

And this is not just about abortion, where Mitt's position seems to have radically shifted, it's about a whole host of issues. He used to try to disassociate himself from Ronald Reagan and the Contract With America, but now he assures us that the Gipper and the Contract are close to his heart. He used to be pro-gun control and wanted nothing to do with the NRA, but now he's against gun grabbers and thinks the NRA is peachy. He came across as a member of the open borders and amnesty crowd whose position wasn't much different than that of John McCain on illegal immigration -- until it became a hot political issue -- and now he's running ads that make him sound like Tom Tancredo on the subject. Then there are the Bush tax cuts, embryonic stem cell research, and the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. There have been so many flips that the flops are still running about two blocks behind, trying to catch up.

Are these shifts genuine? Are they purely for politics' sake? Is Mitt Romney a conservative or is he a squish telling us what we want to hear while planning to take 3 or 4 steps back towards the middle once he feels less pressure to pander to the base? Probably the former, but there's no way to really know the truth. Do we really want a nominee in 2008 that we have this sort of questions about?

While Mitt Romney is certainly not all bad as a candidate, chances are he couldn't win a general election and even if he did, it would be difficult to know whether he would be a Reagan Republican or a Rockefeller Republican when he gets into office.