Romney’s game plan: Take a beating now on health care and hope it goes away later

[jefferson_dem]

Romney’s game plan: Take a beating now on health care and hope it goes away later
By Greg Sargent

After watching Mitt Romney’s painful speech on health care — in which he strongly defended Romneycare’s individual mandate while denouncing Obamacare as tyranny — I think I’ve got his game plan figured out. Romney knows he’s going to take a massive beating on health reform, so he has decided to get it out of the way now, in hopes it fades as an issue by the time the 2012 GOP primary gets going in earnest.

Romney defied predictions by using this speech to mount a surprisingly spirited defense of the individual mandate. And ironically enough, he actually seemed at his most enthusiastic and genuine when defending that provision — even though it’s also his greatest liability. Because Romney is rightly proud of his achievement, and also because he recognizes the political impossiblity of disavowing his number one accomplishment, he instead doubled down on his only option. He argued — as he has for months — that the mandate was a great idea in Massachusetts but constitutes an unacceptable “power grab” on the federal level.

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Only seconds after denouncing Obamacare as a “government takeover,” Romney said: “What we were doing in our state was quite different than that. It was a more modest proposal, if you will. We’re not having a government takeover of health care. Instead, we were trying to find a way to get people in our state that didn’t have insurance, insured.”

But of course, that’s exactly what Obamacare’s individual mandate is also designed to do, and conservatives know it. They don’t care about the federal-versus-state distinction that Romney is drawing. Romney’s fundamental problem is that he disagrees with conservatives on an issue of enormous importance to them. He views the mandate on the state level as a genuinely exciting policy idea; conservatives view it as tyranny. On the state or federal level. Romney hopes that forging common ground with conservatives over the federal mandate will get them to overlook his mandate as a minor transgression that’s at odds with his fundamental political and policy instincts.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/romneys-game-plan-take-a-beating-now-on-health-care-and-hope-it-goes-away-later/2011/03/03/AFvfQH1G_blog.html

I found watching the presentation rather awkward. On the one hand, Romney made odd, patently false claims about the Affordable Care Act and President Obama’s approach. On the other, he offered impassioned defenses of policies I and other lefties agree with, including mandates.

Indeed, one of the great ironies of the day was hearing Romney do a better job of supporting mandates than any Democrat in a long while. The more he explained the benefits of the reform plan he championed in Massachusetts, the more obvious it became that he could have just as easily been defending the Affordable Care Act, since they’re effectively the same thing.

I’m not sure if Romney has fully thought the politics of this through. Republicans want him to denounce his ACA-style law and reject mandates, and today, he did the opposite. Romney made a half-hearted attempt to condemn a national mandate, but he’s still stuck with an unpersuasive line: if the federal government imposes a mandate, it’s tyranny; if a state government imposes a mandate, it’s a great and effective idea that should be applied nationally.

What it ultimately boils down to is this: Romney recognizes the mandate as a good policy and he hasn’t figured out a way to pretend otherwise.

The initial reviews from some on the right weren’t positive. Jonah Goldberg joked that Romney appeared to be auditioning for “David Axelrod’s job”; Peter Suderman said Romney made “a much better case for ObamaCare than against it”; and Jennifer Rubin said, “The only idea dumber than this speech was strapping the Irish setter to the top of the car.”

Ouch.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_05/romney_doesnt_know_how_to_fix029534.php

[Thrill]

1. He can run but he can't hide

He would never make it through a Republican Primary anyway

[TheCowsCameHome]

2. Dems plan: Keep praising Mitt and watch his own eat him alive.

Bye, bye, Mitt.