Flip flops not all created equal

At the risk of coming off as an Edwards apologist (which I decidedly am not!!!) I want to take a moment to disagree with Matt on this:

[L]iberals are primed to believe that Edwards is sincere in his new, more liberal persona, since we tend to think that the New Edwards' stands are correct on the merits, so why shouldn't he find them convincing? Becoming pro-life looks like a pander to me, but to people who find the pro-life view plausible, the view that Romney converted to it is also going to seem more convincing.

Well it's an interesting dichotomy, and I like using dichotomies as analytical tools to evaluate candidates as much as Matt does, but I think here he's pretty wrong.

Abortion--much more than poverty and health-care--is a binary issue. You have two huge groups of people in this country: pro-lifers and pro-choicers. Pro-lifers are almost entirely Republicans and pro-choicers are  (to a lesser extent I think) overwhelmingly Democrats. Within those two groups, you'll find some small disagreements on matters of abortion policy, and politicians who become slightly more or slightly less pro- or anti-choice don't really feel the grief of politicians who go from being pro-choice to being pro-life. Which is pretty much what Romney did.

Poverty and health care and other economic issues tend to have many more shades of grey. Edwards moved a bit to the left economically in the past three or four years and so nobody really cares. If he had once been, say, a vocal libertarian on poverty, then his switch would have been suspicious, but that's not what happened, that hardly ever happens, and when it does, the guilty politicians feel plenty of heat for flip-flopping.