The Romney plan to win: Just ask me and I'll tell you what you want to hear

The (Sort of) New Mitt

By GAIL COLLINS, NYT

Today: Mitt Romney and immigration. 

As you know, American Hispanics are an important and fast-growing voting bloc. Romney has long had a strategy for winning them over. The key, he explained last year, is to tell them “what they know in their heart, which is they or their ancestors did not come here for a handout.”

Hard to get more appealing than that.

This was Primary Mitt, who had a long history of whacking his Republican opponents with soft-on-illegal-immigrants charges. In the 2008 campaign, he accused Rudy Giuliani of making New York a “sanctuary city” and Mike Huckabee of supporting “in-state benefits for illegal immigrants.” One of his ads called John McCain a champion of “amnesty for illegals.” The Romney news release that accompanied the ad’s debut mentioned “amnesty” 17 times.

It didn’t work. McCain won the nomination anyway. That was the earlier version of John McCain, before he lost the presidential race and was abducted by space aliens who took him off to a distant planet and substituted a cranky android with an obsession about border fences.

(More here.)