Mitt Romney is shifting to the center to attract important voting blocs that he may have alienated in the bruising Republican presidential primary.

Romney has recently sought to ingratiate himself with voters in industry-heavy Ohio, women, Hispanics and college students by softening his tone on a range of issues.

{mosads}“Romney is starting to shift to the center. He knows he needs to get independent voters in November, and if he doesn’t he’s going to lose,” said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

Campaign aides, wary of the flip-flopper label that plagued Romney during the 2008 campaign, dispute that he has reversed any of his positions since the fierce battles of Iowa, South Carolina and Ohio.

“Here’s the situation they find themselves in. Policy is politics, and they have much ground to make up among first- and second-time voters, Hispanics, working-class whites, working-class women. They have to move away from the policy positions they felt they had to take to secure the 2008 nomination and the even more extreme positions they took to win the 2012 nomination,” said John Weaver, a political consultant who worked on Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

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“I guess this is what an Etch A Sketch really looks like,” Weaver said, referring to a Romney staffer’s use of the children’s toy as a metaphor for the campaign’s pivot to the general election.

RESCUING THE U.S. AUTO INDUSTRY

Eric Fehrnstrom, the senior adviser to Romney who made the “Etch A Sketch” remark in March, asserted over the weekend that President Obama had followed Romney’s advice by rescuing General Motors and Chrysler at the start of his term.

The claim left the Obama campaign and other Democrats fuming and pointing to Romney’s 2008 op-ed for The New York Times entitled: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

Romney doubled down with another op-ed published on Feb. 14 in The Detroit News, in the heat of the GOP primary, bashing what he called “an $85 billion sweetheart deal disguised as a rescue plan” and “a major taste of crony capitalism, Obama-style.”

While that stance might have been popular among conservative primary voters, it is much less so among independents, especially in Ohio and other Midwestern battlegrounds.

A Pew Research Center poll released in late February found that 56 percent of the public now sees the bailout of automakers as mostly good for the economy. The Center for Automotive Research estimates the bailout saved 1.4 million jobs, many in the Midwest.

Fehrnstrom recast Romney as the mastermind behind the successful rescue.

“His position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed,” Fehrnstrom said. “He said, ‘If you want to save the auto industry, just don’t write them a check. That will seal their doom. What they need to do is go through a managed bankruptcy process.

“The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice,” he added.

A Romney campaign aide said Obama first tried to throw money at the automakers before requiring them to go through a structured bankruptcy.

The aide said Obama let companies go into managed bankruptcy, the path Romney recommended, only after trying to avoid it in a failed ploy that cost taxpayers billions.

Experts who followed the bailout, however, dispute these claims.

John Austin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution based in Michigan, said Romney’s proposal for the automakers to go through managed bankruptcy would not have been viable without billions of dollars in federal funding.

“Obama said we’re not going to keep throwing money at these car companies,” said Austin. “The decision that was taken was ‘We’re going to put money in and insist they go through rigorous restructuring and fast bankruptcy.’”

Kristin Dziczek, an expert with the Center for Automotive Research, said the Obama administration deemed GM’s and Chrysler’s restructuring plans insufficient in February 2009 and offered structured bankruptcy as the only option to accessing additional government loans.

Steve Rattner, the so-called auto czar who handled the bailout for the Obama administration, said no private investors were willing to supply the necessary funding because the credit markets were frozen. The administration invested $82 billion into the auto companies and is expected to lose $10 billion to $15 billion in the deal.

Romney’s February op-ed in The Detroit News drew stern rebukes from business leaders in the auto industry.

Mike Jackson, chief executive officer of AutoNation Inc., one of the nation’s largest auto dealers, called Romney’s op-ed “truly reckless, detached from reality and dishonest,” according to Bloomberg News. The criticism was especially stinging because Jackson had been a Romney supporter.

The bailout saved tens of thousands of jobs in Ohio, home to more than 350 auto-parts manufacturers and a crucial campaign battleground.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster and strategist, said Romney is doing what he needs to win the general election.

“By definition in a general election, you’re appealing to a broader audience than in a primary process,” he said. “You have to address issues of less interest to primary audiences and of more concern to a general election audience and that’s what he’s doing.”

STUDENT LOANS

Romney has also sought to airbrush his image among young voters.

At a Feb. 29 campaign event, Romney took a hard line against the federal government subsidizing student loans.

“I wish I could tell you that there’s a place to find really cheap money or free money and we could pay for everyone’s education. That’s just not going to happen,” Romney told a female law student.

“The right course for America is for businesses and universities and colleges to compete for us to make sure we provide loans to the extent we possibly can at an interest rate that doesn’t have the taxpayers having to subsidize people who want to go to school,” he said.

Romney softened his position on student loans last month when he endorsed Obama’s proposal for the federal government to continue subsidizing loans for low- and middle-income students. If Congress does not intervene by July 1, student loan rates will jump from 3.4 percent to 6.8.

Keeping loan rates low, however, will cost taxpayers an estimated $6 billion a year. 

A Romney campaign aide disputed that Romney has reversed himself. The staffer noted that Romney has agreed only to support a temporary extension to help students struggling in an economy that he said is suffering because of Obama’s policies.

Ayres, the GOP pollster, said young voters will be much more important in the general election than they were in the primary.

“There are far fewer young people in a Republican primary than in a general election,” he said. “It makes more sense to talk about student loans in a general election.”

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VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT

Romney also made an appeal to women voters last month by voicing his support for reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act despite concerns some Republican senators had with Senate legislation.

“Gov. Romney supports the Violence Against Women Act and hopes it can be reauthorized without turning it into a political football,” a spokeswoman for Romney’s campaign said at the time.

{mosads}While the statement stopped short of endorsing the controversial Senate bill, it undercut the position of Senate Republicans who opposed it. Despite concerns over the bill’s constitutionality, GOP senators decided not to filibuster the bill in hope the provisions could be removed later in Senate-House negotiations.

Congressional Democrats have certainly noticed Romney’s move to the center.

“The Etch A Sketch is coming sooner than I thought. He’s for education, now he’s for [the] Violence Against Women [Act]. Great,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in remarks dripping with sarcasm.

IMMIGRATION REFORM

Romney has made a renewed bid for Hispanic voters, as well. He has shelved the tough talking points of the primary when he called for a policy of “self-deportation” to address millions of illegal immigrants living in the country.  

“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide that they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here,” Romney said at a Florida debate.

“I don’t think they had to, but they took [former Rep.] Tom Tancredo’s [R-Colo.] position on immigration [in the primary],” said Weaver. “You can’t get to 270 electoral votes unless he does better among Hispanics.”

In Iowa, Romney slammed Newt Gingrich’s call for a humane immigration policy to avert the deportation of people who have put down deep roots in the country. Romney said Gingrich had “offered a new doorway to amnesty.”

Romney initially said he would veto a scaled-back immigration reform bill titled the DREAM Act. He later walked that comment back.

Romney’s rhetoric had grown so sharp in the primary that Robert Gittelson, co-founder of Conservatives for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, wrote an open letter to Romney in The Christian Post website in late January asking the candidate to tone it down.

Gittelson said Romney has done so since entering the general-election phase of his campaign.

“I don’t know if that letter made a difference. Certainly since he has become the presumptive nominee he has spoken more moderately on the issue of immigration,” said Gittelson.

Last month, while campaigning with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Romney signaled he may be open to granting legal status to illegal immigrants who came to the country at a young age. Rubio is crafting an alternative to the DREAM Act, which provides a pathway to citizenship to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children if they meet certain requirements.

Rubio’s bill would not give these immigrants a special pathway to citizenship, but it would resemble the Democratic bill in other ways.

“He and I have spoken about his thinking on his version of a different act than the DREAM Act that’s been proposed in the Senate,” Romney said while campaigning with Rubio. 

“I’m taking a look at his proposal,” he added. “It has many features to commend it. But it’s something that we’re studying.”

Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, an anti-illegal immigration advocacy group that defeated the DREAM Act in past years, said Rubio’s proposal would amount to amnesty.

“Everything we’re reading about says the bill would give [illegal immigrants] a permanent presence and a permanent access to jobs,” Beck said. “It’s absolutely an amnesty. Not a citizenship amnesty but an amnesty.”