comMITTed to Romney!

 …if you throw him a knotty problem that needs to be solved by Friday, he’s the candidate we’d bet on to have it done by Tuesday.

The Hartford Courant, from the Editors:

Mitt Romney’s record while governor of Massachusetts was much better than he’s given credit for. It’s the record of an achiever.

The Republican governor led the fight to control sprawl and bring more affordable housing to the Bay State with groundbreaking laws and a dramatic reorganization of state agencies. In 2003, he combined transportation, housing, environmental and energy agencies into a super-agency, charged it with stopping runaway suburban growth, then appointed a Democrat environmentalist to run it. By comparison, Connecticut is still nibbling around the edges of smart growth.

The former venture-capital company CEO and rescuer of the 2002 Winter Olympics also worked with the Democratic legislature to stop job losses and reduce a projected $3 billion budget shortfall. He managed to balance his state’s budget without sales or income tax or gas increases. And he streamlined other government agencies — all while maintaining the state’s huge accomplishments from a decade of education reforms that put Massachusetts ahead of Connecticut on many academic achievement scores.

Though some in his party abhorred it as “socialized medicine,” Mr. Romney backed a bold state plan to cover the uninsured that required every Massachusetts citizen to have health insurance but provided aid for those who couldn’t afford it. His business school case-method approach to health care — let states experiment; see who comes up with the best ideas — is the most likely to yield ingenious and flexible solutions to an increasingly worrisome national issue.

Mr. Romney’s shifts on his views on abortion, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage and other issues are indeed troubling: Conservatives as well as liberals are unsure of what to expect from him if elected. But those who have worked with him praise his openness, his easy ability to transcend narrow political ideology to get a job done. And presidential candidates often pay tribute to the traditional wings of their parties at primary time. Mr. Romney’s chief rival, Arizona Sen. John McCain, has pandered as well in, for example, changing his position on the Bush tax cuts, which he once voted against and now wants extended.

We part company with Mr. McCain on his opposition to abortion and his support of the war in Iraq, among other things. But he has earned The Courant’s admiration as a campaign-finance reformer, a voice of decency in the treatment of prisoners of war and a heroic maverick who will cross the aisle to achieve bipartisan compromise on issues such as immigration.

With the economy gaining on the war in Iraq as the leading worry for Americans, however, Mr. Romney’s real-world grasp of economic principles, his real-world successes on both sides of the public/private-sector aisle, are increasingly valuable assets.

Mark Twain said about Wagner that his music “is better than it sounds.” Mr. Romney is a better leader than his perplexing campaign performance makes him out to be. He doesn’t have the smooth-talking populist appeal of Sen. Mike Huckabee or the years of working on public policy that Sen. McCain does. But if you throw him a knotty problem that needs to be solved by Friday, he’s the candidate we’d bet on to have it done by Tuesday.

He’s believable when he promises to bring “innovation and transformation” to Washington. He has done it.

He is The Courant’s choice for the Feb. 5 Republican presidential primary.

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