Opinion: Dorothy Rabinowitz: Voters Might Appreciate the Serious Romney299 comments

From all corners of the commentariat, advisers friendly and unfriendly have declared it time for Mitt Romney to reveal himself—to let go at last and show the real Mitt he's allegedly been keeping secret. A fetching notion, but not the kind that wins elections. Forget the real Romney. Voters looking for a victory over Barack Obama would settle for the Romney on hand—the only real one, and unlikely to get any more so—as long as he's equipped for the requirements of the battle ahead.

It would help if he showed, first of all, a capacity to run a campaign not obviously dependent on the latest polls, or the fears of consultants. He could begin by ignoring the chorus of hysterics agonizing over the gender gap, then proceed to comport himself like a presidential candidate who grasps that women see themselves as citizens like any other—not as a separate group assigned victim status, to be favored with special tenderness.

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The presumptive Republican nominee and his wife, Ann

He could see to it that the women of America aren't favored by any more shout-outs from Ann Romney during his campaign appearances. The Romney campaign has had some famous streaks of tone deafness but nothing quite as strange as Mrs. Romney's congratulations to women on Super Tuesday night, with arm-waving and huzzahs, cheerleader-style. Women were concerned with things like the economy, with jobs, Mrs. Romney joyfully announced. A testimonial that suggested, unmistakably, that this interest in jobs and the state of the economy was—in the view of the Romney campaign—a new and wondrous achievement for the gender that had had, until now, hardly a thought about such matters.

The congratulations-to-women-for-thinking theme continues apace. On April 23, Mrs. Romney told a Connecticut audience of her happy discovery that women she had encountered were interested in the economy. "Believe it or not," she marveled, "they were talking about budget deficits." We can believe it. What's hard to believe is that pronouncements like this are anyone's notion of outreach to female voters. Mr. Romney would do well to skip the obeisances to women, along with all other knee-jerk responses to the programmed war-against-women accusations mounted by Democrats.

He'd do well, too, to discard the established wisdom that his indisputably appealing wife is his most powerful weapon—and to cease regularly throwing her at audiences. There is only one campaign presence that counts for voters, and his name is at the top of the ticket.

If that ticket is to be a winning one, Mr. Romney had better begin doing what Republican primary candidates so assiduously avoided doing for so many months. Other than those pronouncements extracted by debate moderators, there has been no silence more deafening, more ridden with fear—fear of the isolationist wing of the tea party—than that shown by the Republican candidates this year on matters of foreign policy.

Mr. Romney had better spell out clear positions on that, and on our national security. Even now the ideologically deranged sector of the tea party—tormented believers whose every living hour is devoted to the discovery of newer and more terrible violations of the Constitution—is pushing a serious legal war on the government's right to detain terrorists.

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