Dear Fred,

I’m writing both as a friend and as a sympathetic observer of your possible candidacy. You are probably getting all kinds of free advice right now, most of it worth what you paid. I had a few thoughts about the early days of the campaign for you to add to the pile.

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First off, rent some movies. Watch Journeys with George and The War Room to get a reminder of how intense, grueling, and intrusive presidential campaigns are. And if anyone advises you that you can run “a different kind of campaign” that is less demanding, be very skeptical. And while you have seen negative ads against you, of course, in a presidential campaign they will reach an entirely new level.

Second, announce your decision soon. A Republican strategist went through the calendar with me. Many states are holding their primaries on Feb. 5. In those that allow mail-in votes for the previous month, voting will start on Jan. 5. That means you will need more than enough signatures to file by around Thanksgiving. And that, in turn, means that you need to have an organization and money in place “well before Labor Day.” August is mostly lost time, notes this strategist, so you need to “be up and running by Memorial Day at the latest.” Plus, people might get tired of waiting for you to commit.

Third, acknowledge that you’ve gotten more pro-life over time. Twice in recent weeks, you have expressed perplexity that anyone thinks you were once pro-choice. Stephen Hayes quoted you in The Weekly Standard:

“I have read these accounts and tried to think back 13 years ago as to what may have given rise to them. Although I don’t remember it, I must have said something to someone as I was getting my campaign started that led to a story. Apparently, another story was based upon that story, and then another was based upon that, concluding I was pro-choice.”

But, he adds: “I was interviewed and rated pro-life by the National Right to Life folks in 1994, and I had a 100 percent voting record on abortion issues while in the Senate.”

Your record in the mid-1990s was a bit less solidly pro-life than that. A 1994 issue of Republican Liberty apparently quotes you opposing public financing of abortion but adding: “The ultimate decision must be made by the woman. Government should treat its citizens as adults capable of making moral decisions on their own.” That same year, in which you ran for the Senate (and won), you said something similar in a debate: There should be no federal funding, and states should be allowed to enact parental notification and other “reasonable controls,” but government should not “come in and criminalize, let’s say, a young girl and her parents and her doctor as aiders and abettors that would be involved.”

News accounts treated you as pro-choice, and there is no record of your campaign’s trying to dispute that characterization. The National Right to Life Committee did indeed endorse you in that race, and their post-election newsletter listed you among the victorious “pro-life candidates” that year. But that newsletter also grouped you with candidates who were opposed to the Freedom of Choice Act and federal funding of abortion, rather than with candidates who were pro-life across the board.

In 1997, finally, your office sent a constituent a letter about abortion that included this line: “I believe that government should not interfere with individual convictions and actions in this area.”

I think the record suggests that you were always uncomfortable with abortion and prepared to support some restrictions on it, but that your opposition deepened over the course of your time in public life. The whole country’s discomfort with abortion seems to have deepened over that time, too. (In part, that was a result of the partial-birth abortion debate in which you were involved.) If that is what happened, I don’t think pro-lifers will hold it against you to say so. Those pro-lifers who worry about the sincerity of Mitt Romney’s conversion do so because he seemed ardently pro-choice not long ago. As you said, you have a strong record of voting with pro-lifers that goes back to 1995.