Adrian Walker writes in The Boston Globe:

Relax, America. Mitt Romney’s got your back.

No more of Barack Obama’s pathetic groveling for the world’s greatest nation. No more apologies to the Muslim world. No more suggestion that America encounters problems it can’t solve.

With his new book, “No Apology: The Case For American Greatness,’’ our former governor seeks to demolish what he views as the shameful tendency of Obama and his ilk to blame America for the world’s problems.

There is, of course, nothing new about the relentless optimism of Willard Mitt Romney, a man who has never seen a problem he couldn’t roll up his sleeves and lick. By the standards of most of us mere mortals, Romney has lived a life practically devoid of problems, but he has always considered that beside the point. He almost makes Ronald Reagan, one of his heroes, look like a glass-half-empty kind of guy.

The book is another step in Romney’s long metamorphosis from the moderate who dueled with Ted Kennedy in 1994 to fierce partisan warrior. He started out as a Republican many Massachusetts Democrats thought they could live with.

But he learned years ago that moderate will not cut it in Republican national politics; that’s when Massachusetts became a punch line for him.

The 2008 election left the Republican Party with a bit of an identity crisis, torn between the idea-free charisma of Sarah Palin and the ideologues who believed that the Democrats were willing to march away from the iron-fisted legacy of Dick Cheney. To his credit, Romney - who’s far too bright to do otherwise - seems to believe that there is still a place for actual ideas.

But his ambivalence toward Massachusetts and his own accomplishments is still maddening. He seems to be proud to be one of the architects of universal health care in Massachusetts, while deriding the “Obamacare’’ that is directly derived from it. This isn’t a new problem for Romney: He spent a lot of his presidential bid in 2008 running away from his signature achievement.

Perhaps he is really just a man without a party. Too detached to embrace the Tea Party movement, too entrenched in the financial world to bash Wall Street greed, too cerebral to make a convincing populist, where does he go for his votes? There are no lessons in the ascendancy of Scott Brown for Mitt Romney. He’s not a guy you can easily picture making an ad about his pickup truck.

It isn’t an easy position for a man of such raw ambition, for whom so much has come easily. In his first run for office, he gave Kennedy a legitimate challenge. When he decided he wanted to be governor, we had a sitting governor who was running for office. Jane Swift was history in a matter of days. This is a man of big dreams, usually realized.

True, he wasn’t much of a governor, health care excepted, but then, he didn’t really want the job. He wanted the title and the power, but sparring with some Senate president from East Boston was never part of the vision.

Now he is off on his unannounced campaign for president. (Any politician whose book tour takes him to Iowa and New Hampshire is running for president.) He appeared on “The View’’ last week, where Barbara Walters seemed skeptical of the idea that one party is responsible for all the country’s problems. It was a bit odd to see him with Barbara, Joy, and Whoopi talking about national security, but there he was, following the kid from “Twilight.’’ He looked a little embarrassed, truth be told.

But a campaign is coming, and he seems to be in it. At different times Romney has supported, then opposed, abortion rights; he’s been a moderate, a populist, a stalwart of the Religious Right, and a gun-control opponent. With many of those stances out of style, he is now an Obama-bashing hawk.

Underneath all those labels is an ambitious and accomplished person. But Republican primary voters aren’t the only ones who have a hard time deciding what he stands for.