Liberal columnist, Jay Bookman, in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Mitt Romney is still trying to be what he isn’t

When the AJC interviewed Mitt Romney before the 2008 Georgia presidential primary, a conservative journalist in the room turned to me afterward and said:

“Based on that, I’d say he’s the perfect nominee … for the Democrats.”

I knew what he meant. Romney came across as the most liberal Republican I’d seen or heard in years. And it wasn’t just talk. His record as governor of Massachusetts was that of a competent, practical, non-ideological corporate executive, as exemplified by his advocacy of a health-reform plan quite similar to that now proposed in Washington.

But of course, many conservatives would look at that same record very differently, as confirmation of Romney’s RINO status.

It’s a problem that Romney is working hard to solve. His new book, “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness,” is part of an effort to rebrand himself as a hard-shell conservative. Among other things, he uses the book to criticize President Obama’s alleged “Apology Tour,” which Romney calls “a steady stream of criticisms, put-downs and jabs directed at the nation he was elected to represent and defend.”

But his big problem, of course, is health care, as Chris Wallace made clear in an interview with Romney on Fox News yesterday. Wallace pointed out that in the plan signed by Romney in 2006, “you have an individual mandate. You have an employer mandate. You have subsidiaries for some of the uninsured. You set minimum insurance coverage standards. Again, a lot of e-mails I got from conservatives say — make this point. They say it sure sounds an awful lot like “ObamaCare.”

Yes it does. Romney ducks and dodges in the interview, throwing out alleged differences between RomneyCare and ObamaCare that Wallace immediately refutes. In the end, Romney can identify only one important substantive difference: His plan is run by the state government, while Obama’s approach would be federal.

Every politician from city council member up to president has to tailor himself to his electorate, and in many ways that’s a perfectly legitimate, honorable process. After all, the politician is offering to serve as the people’s representative, and to some degree should and must embrace the wishes of the people over his own.

However, I can’t think of a politician on the national or even state scene who struggles more with that problem than Romney. The chasm between who he naturally is and who he must be to get elected in the modern Republican Party is huge, and his efforts to camouflage that gap often come off appearing awkward and insincere.

Personally, I think he’d make a much better president than any of the other top candidates for the GOP nomination. And that’s exactly his problem.