I wonder if Mitt Romney is having any second thoughts about comparing Massachusetts residents to a bunch of vegetarians.
"Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts," he told a South Carolina audience in 2005, when he was testing the presidential waters, "is like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention." Must have cracked them up.
All of a sudden, our former governor is locked in a surprisingly close battle to win Tuesday's Republican primary here.
Or maybe it isn't all that surprising. His popularity has been waning for a long time. Actually, it probably peaked the day he was elected governor in 2002.
Romney always understood that he was a political anomaly here, even by the standards of his more moderate Republican predecessors. After running as a moderate in his 1994 US Senate race, he tacked right and began to reinvent himself as a full-bore conservative. For a while, the transformation went fine.
It isn't hard to pinpoint the day the love affair went sour. As soon as the Supreme Judicial Court decided that gay marriage was legal, Massachusetts immediately became, for Mitt, the nation's liberal loony bin.
Romney shouldn't have any trouble Tuesday in winning the votes of the 14 or so registered Republicans voters left in Massachusetts. But among the many unenrolled voters who will certainly decide the GOP primary, his change of heart may cost him - and should.
It isn't just his off-key sense of humor that is handicapping his campaign.
Some voters might remember the governor who said he would bring jobs and economic growth to the state, the promise he struggled to keep. By the end of his term, he had created 24,400 new jobs, the fourth-worst rate in the country over that span of time.
Others might recall his opposition to a multistate effort at controlling greenhouse gas emissions, a measure that he supported before he was against it. Not to mention his well-publicized changes of position on stem cell research, gun control, you name it.
Certainly, he was stymied in many efforts by the Legislature. It rejected his bid to bring back the death penalty - good for them, I say - and thwarted his plans to cut the state's income tax.
It is telling, though, that by the end of his term, even Republicans had given up standing with his vetoes. By his last year in office, all of his vetoes were overridden, and on many of them, Republicans stood unanimously with Democrats.
It isn't that Romney was a bad governor, though I think he performed well below his ability, largely due to his outbreak of Potomac fever. The point is that he traded the support of Massachusetts residents for a more salable national profile.
Romney's supporters always said too much was made of his habit of poking fun at us, that everyone should lighten up. But his barbs didn't sit well with people who believed he might have been a lot more successful at bringing jobs to Massachusetts, for example, if he wasn't undercutting the state for fun.
Obviously, Massachusetts isn't a crucial state for the Republican candidates, even though most analysts believe the race remains too close to call. Still, losing the Bay State would be an embarrassment for one of the candidates, and it isn't John McCain.
Romney won the primary in Michigan, a state he hasn't lived in since high school, partly on the strength of his appeal as a hometown candidate. But in Massachusetts, where he has spent most of his adult life, his familiarity is much more of a mixed bag.
Goodness knows he isn't the first governor who became less popular after leaving office; one could argue that it's the norm. But Romney hasn't gone anywhere. His problem isn't being forgotten. His problem is how he's remembered.
Perhaps all those suburban independents who elected him will bail him out. It's not clear that he can count on it, though. As one Democrat crowed yesterday, "Now the joke's on him." And it very well may be.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.
