Newsweek's poll numbers have him down to an irrelevant 26% when matched up against John Edwards, and 17% when matched up against Rudy Guiliani in the primaries. If the Republican Race comes down to Romney and McCain, Romney scores 19%. (Though he may do well in New Hampshire, there's some reporting indicating that Giuliani is starting to gain momentum there.) Here's what National Review on line had to say about Romney's speech and as a contrast, the same speech reported in the The New York Times. The Salt Lake City Tribune has a decidedly different perspective, that could be summarizes as "Look Out, Democrats, Here Comes Mitt!" (uh huh). The Clinton camp felt it necessary, or useful, to expose Romney's weakness, foreign policy, after he criticized her call for "extrication." That hardly makes him much of a contender. A punching bag, maybe. I know, it's still early. It's not just foreign policy that will continue to present challenges to Romney. Yesterday he was in Columbia, South Carolina explaining how he went from being "effectively pro-choice" until he heard Harvard "leaders" discuss research using 14-day old stem cells (as he characterized it, the one of the Harvardians said "destruction of a 14-day old embryo is not a moral issue") and as a result he had an epiphany that Roe v. Wade had "cheapened the value of human life." Quite a leap, Mitt, but good news to the "base," if they believe your Harvard-Stem-Cell-Research inspired conversion. Welcome to the loony anti-stem cell research right. Stem cell research opponents will get a shellacking again this time around, I'm sure. Remember Michael J. Fox's impassioned TV ads. You really don't want celebrities with terminal conditions accusing you of standing in the way of a cure, especially with powerful Governors like Schwarzenegger and Spitzer already competing to be state leaders in stem cell research. Opposing stem cell research might SEEM like a great way to make your way to a pro-life position, and perhaps for some it will make perfect sense, but I still see it as a crafty way to justify a flip-flop on the single greatest issue of importance to the Christianist Right, and to scoop up the stem cell research folks (remind everyone that Harvard=northeast liberal elite=destruction of life) isn't such a surprising gambit. One issue that is not so much a challenge for Romney, as it is a subject to dodge for the moment, is immigration. But hey, at least he asserted the need for immigrants to learn English! Good point, Mitt, they are resisting taking on your Mother Tongue, but with you as President I'm sure that will change. Good grief.