From the moment Mitt Romney agreed to sit down for an interview with Bill O’Reilly, no one could have expected that interview to be a cakewalk for Romney. Nonetheless, Romney stood his ground tonight as O’Reilly questioned whether he was a conservative of convenience, how he explained having implemented Romneycare, and what he thought of his latest close rival, Newt Gingrich.

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O’Reilly started off the interview from the bottom up for Romney, forcing to identify and defend the “thing you were most wrong about” off the bat. Romney answered that it was “the issue of life and abortion,” as he had noted last week during the Fox News presidential debate, explaining that it took the experience of being in office to understand how abortion was an unacceptable attack on human life to him.

After the conversation on abortion expired, O’Reilly asked Romney whether he considered himself conservative at all, and why. “I’m a conservative– I’

ve become more conservative over time,’ Romney replied, adding that he believed his governing record was “pretty conservative” and that his most-attacked liberal position, his health care mandate, “came from conservatives at the Heritage Foundation.” “I’m trying to figure out why a guy like you… with a lot of policy experience is going to the right,” O’Reilly replied, adding that many voters are wondering that if Romney wins the primary, “you’ll go back to being a Massachusetts guy.”

Romney replied that he had “the same posture and same views in my last presidential run,” and that as governor he “cut taxes 19 times”– there was more than enough conservative record there to work with, he contended. As for his opponent, answering to the claim he made that Gingrich was “zany,” he noted the latest from the Ideas Man: an idea to arrest justices if they pass down holdings that the president doesn’t agree with. “That’s not exactly a practical idea or a conservative idea.”

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The first half of O’Reilly’s interview with Romney via Fox News below:
Tags: Bill O'Reilly, election, Fox News, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, The O'Reilly Factor