In an “Almanac” segment from Friday’s show involving representatives of the remaining Repub contenders for prez, former Repub state Chair Ron Carey represented the Rick Santorum campaign. Carey worried aloud about the regrettable things that can happen when the party nominates someone (like Mitt Romney) who hasn’t been a “consistent conservative.” Said Carey:

We’ve been fooled before. I remember Nixon went to China when I was a kid. We don’t want to have another repeat of somebody who runs as a conservative only to govern as a moderate.

In case you aren’t old enough to recall: after the 1949 Communist takeover of mainland China, the United States spent more than 20 refusing to accept or even to officially acknowledge that China was governed by Communists, which became more and more ludicrous and counter-productive.

Richard Nixon had risen in national politics as a consistent, fierce anti-Communist and red-baiter. Then in 1972, Nixon shocked (and thrilled) the world by traveling to China, meeting with Chairman Mao and beginning the normalization of U.S.-China relations.

Nixon’s trip to China has generally been viewed as one of his top foreign policy accomplishments and Nixon-to-China has become a metaphor for the good things that can happen when a hard-liner is willing to make a sudden reversal in a long-held position.

But apparently young Ron Carey was traumatized and worries that if Mitt Romney becomes president, he’s liable to pull some similar crazy liberal stunt like Nixon going to China.