Jonathan Martin has a smart post up about the conflicting challenges the Romney campaign faces: Romney is trying to distance himself from the mess Bush's GOP has made of the country. At the same time, he has to win over a Republican establishment that's still skeptical of his moderate Massachusetts pedigree, to say nothing of his Mormonism. As Jonathan puts it, "he's wanting to give the Sunday sermon a week after he joined the church." I agree that Romney faces a dilemma here. But I also think it's a dilemma of his own making. Over the last few weeks, Romney has become very explicit about the "distancing" aspect of his campaign. His latest commercial, called "Change Begins with Us," involves him looking into the camera and riffing about how it's time to change Washington, get Republicans acting like Republicans again, etc. Romney was also hitting the change theme pretty hard at the Republican retreat in Makinac Island, Michigan last weekend. (See Jonathan on this, too). I guess I'm not sure why Romney needed to get so explicit about "change." Certainly the eventual Republican nominee will need to ease the party away from Bush. But it's not at all clear why this needed to start in the primaries. And, even if it did, I think it was pretty obvious, even before Romney's "change" offensive, that he was the first-tier Republican candidate most likely to represent a break with Bush--his business background and tenure in Massachusetts suggested a kind of pragmatic, empirically-minded competence that's basically the opposite of Bush's approach. (Rudy might have contended for that niche, but instead he opted to hug Bush on the war on terror.) By making the change theme explicit, Romney doesn't tell GOP establishment types anything they couldn't have sussed out on their own, but he comes pretty close to criticizing the president and the congressional wing of the party, which risks offending their sense of partisan loyalty and decorum. I still think Romney is likely to win the nomination, but, frankly, that judgment is dependent on how quickly he junks this latest tactic. --Noam Scheiber