Brian Beutler February 2, 2012, 5:41 AM

The fight for Florida’s fifty delegates was more than just a key test for the four remaining Republican presidential hopefuls. It also took the GOP’s three year experiment with far-right politics into a more appropriate laboratory — a state where the voters didn’t reflect the party’s base as neatly as they did in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

And though Mitt Romney trampled his opponents and solidified his status as the nominee-in-waiting, Florida was also a wake-up call. To win so resoundingly, Romney had to inch away from conservative movement dogma for the first time since he began his candidacy.

It wasn’t easy.

The right’s agenda in 2012 doesn’t really have much to offer the Hispanic, elderly, and under-water home-owning voters who picked Romney over the others in Florida. And on issues that directly affect those constituencies — constituencies that will figure prominently in the general election — Romney lurched awkwardly to the left in a way that worried movement conservatives.

Romney’s tonal shift on Medicare concerned conservatives most.

“We will never go after Medicare or Social Security, we will protect those programs,” Romney told a crowd full of seniors. “[I]f I’m president, I will protect Medicare and Social Security for those that are currently retired or near retirement, and I’ll make sure we keep those programs solvent for the next generations coming along. We will protect America’s seniors and America’s young people with programs that are designed to keep them well and safe. And I will make sure that we protect Medicare and Social Security.”

That’s a none-too-subtle twist on an old favorite. The GOP proposals to phase out Medicare all include a caveat that current seniors will see no change. When speaking to seniors in Florida, though, Romney made that caveat the central focus of his plan.

Forgotten were the details of his actual plan: Romney wants to phase out Medicare for just about everyone who isn’t already on or nearly eligible for the program, and provide future seniors subsidies to either buy private insurance or a public option built off the existing Medicare risk pool.

Romney wants those subsidies to grow at a rate well below medical inflation, such that future seniors will find themselves less and less able to afford care over time. But it’s not just people 55 and under who would take a hit under this plan. Over time, it likely would threaten the Medicare guarantee for those grandfathered into the program as it exists today. As their population aged and thinned, the program’s actuarial soundness would deteriorate until they were forced to jump into the private market — if the private market would take them.

This turned out to be a pattern he repeated with Hispanics and homeowners as well.

Florida’s Hispanic Republicans were introduced to a Mitt Romney who wants to sign a version of the DREAM Act “if it were focused on military service.” In other words, illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. as children would be provided citizenship if they maintained a clean criminal record and joined the military. This is a key requirement of an existing version of the DREAM Act, which provides the same pathway to immigrants who attend college for at least two years.

Before Florida, Romney’s emphasis was precisely the opposite. He has insisted adamantly that as president he would veto the DREAM Act; the fact that he might sign a different version of it was an afterthought.

Romney also scalded himself months ago when he told the Las Vegas Review Journal, “don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course, and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy up homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up, and let it turn around and come back up.”

But last week he sympathized to a crowd in Tampa, “the idea that somehow this is going to cure itself all by itself is unreal…. There’s going to have to be a much more concerted effort to work with the lending institutions and help them take action.”

These sorts of shifts are typically symptoms of general election politics. Romney tellingly had to trot them out in a GOP primary — and even to an audience of Republican voters the shifts were sharp. If he wins the nomination, he’ll be forced further left — but he’s already left a substantial trail of crumbs to the right-wing policies he sold the conservative base.

2012, 2012 Presidential Primaries, 2012 elections, Barack Obama, DREAM Act, Foreclosures, Medicare, Mitt Romney, Social Security