Longtime readers will know I haven't traditionally considered myself a big fan of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. You can find columns on this site dating from 2006 and 2007 in which I criticized his health care plan harshly. Recently, items like this and this have appeared, which testify to ongoing problems. RomneyCare has, indeed, historically been the policy most associated with Romney with which I have taken the most issue-- though there are also others I find problematic, and this is probably why he wasn't my first or second personal choice for the GOP presidential nomination last year (though I hasten to point out that had he won it, I would have gone to bat for him happily). Still, I must say that upon a cursory read of this, I found myself more nodding than not:

For a while, it looked like Mitt Romney would become more a figure of ridicule than promise. Stiff, square, and allegedly two-faced, the former Massachusetts governor was a triple-punchline target of late-night comics.

But now, with a more statesmanlike bearing and some measured criticisms of the Obama administration, Romney suddenly seems like the only adult left standing among the 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls. [intro]

[...]

It's unlikely that Romney could have helped the GOP avoid defeat, and the financial collapse in the midst of the fall campaign would have cast unflattering attention on Romney's associations with investors and bankers....

Last month, I posted briefly about the prospect of a Chris Dodd-Rob Simmons matchup, noting that Simmons, someone for whom I have a great deal of personal respect, appeared interested in taking on Dodd, who has been plagued by controversy regarding, er, housing issues for many months now.

Today, we learn via the AP that were Simmons to take on Dodd, he'd start out just about evenly matched (in fact, slightly ahead) against the incumbent:

A new Quinnipiac University Poll shows U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd facing a tough re-election bid in 2010 if his challenger is former Republican U.S. Rep. Rob Simmmons of Stonington.

 If the election were held today, Dodd would garner 42 percent of those surveyed while Simmons would win 43 percent.

Note: Quinnipiac's survey was of 1,238 registered voters, with a 2.8 percentage-point MOE.

This is pretty good news considering that a) it's Connecticut and b) Dodd has been in the Senate for close to 30 years now.  The way that Dodd has handled himself over recent months makes clear that it's beyond time for him to go.  Perhaps Simmons can help get him packing. [intro]

Andrew Sullivan posts:

"What attracted me to conservatism as a young person in the early 1980s was its challenge to engage and understand some real thinkers -- Hayek, von Mises, Kirk, Buckley, Friedman, Chambers. You didn't have to be an intellectual, but you needed to understand them. Reagan did. Now, instead of intellectuals, we have clowns like Joe the Plumber and Limbaugh getting all the attention. Conservatism is overopinionated and undereducated, proudly intolerant and insular -- populated by the type of Americans who (this happened) would spit on Darwin's tomb in Westminster Abbey," - David Frum, in a must-read.

My own evolution as a young conservative was more fueled by Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Amalryk, Hayek, Lewis, Bernard Levin, and eventually, as I grew old enough to understand them, Oakeshott and Strauss. My own bastardized version of conservatism was always fueled by a sense that it was more intellectually rigorous than liberalism. And because it had to find the intellectual resources to counter the suffocating left-liberal elite consensus of the 1970s, it was often more in shape than its chief rival, liberalism....