As Herman Cain is suddenly aware and Mitt Romney has known for a while, running for president is no picnic.

The electorate wants you to project a lot of ideal qualities, such as, to name just a few: strength, smarts, experience, leadership, compassion, likeability, electability, humor, seriousness, regular guy (or gal) -ness, consistency and then there's that thing the talking heads call "authenticity."

Achieving the right level of subtle phoniness that enables you to project "candor" and "sincerity" without saying anything that will be declared a gaffe or piss off key constituencies must be a constant challenge and it's surely worse now that everything you do and say in public is likely to become a Youtube video. We should have more compassion for these poor slobs.

Romney is gifted in a few of the categories. He exudes intelligence when he speaks. He is the current king of electability in the current Repub crop. But one of the keys to his electability -- that he comes across as less of a right-winger than the others -- is a serious problem as he seeks the nomination from a party dominated by its right wing. Romney actually currently has the currently acceptable conservative position on almost every issue. It's just that some of those positions contradict positions he has held previously in his public career. Abortion is one of the big ones. Romney could not have been elected governor of Massachusetts if he had been an anti-abortion stalwart. And he wasn't. And now he couldn't hope to get the Repub nomination for prez unless he declares himself to be categorically "pro-life." And he does. This is a potential killer problem as far as appealing to the social conservatives. And if he does get the nomination, it's virtually an established fact that Pres. Obama will run against him as a candidate lacking core beliefs, willing to adopt whatever positions will appeal in the moment.

Personally, I think it's important for poltiicians to be allowed to change their minds. But one can't help but notice that such changes always seem to fit the political needs of the moment when the change occurs. Hard to know where to go with that.

Anyway, all that is by way of introducing a couple of comments Romney made in an interview with the editorial board the Seacoast Media Group, a Fox subsidiaries that owns small newspapers on the coast of New Hampshire and Maine. Romney was asked about the inconsistencies in his positions on certain issues over the years and the poor guy just tried too hard to make the problem go away without explaining it:

“I’ve been as consistent as human beings can be,” he said. And then, maybe even worse, "I cannot state every single issue in exactly the same words every single time."

And then, of course, it became an instant Youtube video. It's only 47 seconds:

hat tip to Taegan Goddard