Jonathan Chait summarizes Mitt Romney's utterly impossible sales job:
At the state level, the individual mandate is a humane, cost-effective tool for rationalizing the health care market. At the federal level, it is the greatest threat to freedom in American history. That is Romney's stance.
As Chait suggests, why a citizen of solid right-wing credentials would feel less oppressed because his state is imposing a mandate, rather than the federal government, is an enduring mystery.
Don't tell it to NPR who just this morning previewed the emerging conventional wisdom on Romney's political pickle. It goes something like this:
* Emergency rooms were costing Mass. taxpayers millions of dollars
* Had to do something to get the deadbeats off the dole
* Introduced My Great Experiment - Romneycare
* Some of it good, some not so good
* There are things I would change
* Obamacare is unconstitutional and must be repealed
* The end
Report went on to laud his poll numbers in NH (25% ahead of everyone else) and the fact that, when asked, NH Republicans don't see healthcare at all as a serious issue.
Posted by: nepat | May 12, 2011 at 07:52 AM
I caught a snippet on local TV news saying, I believe, that Romney is promising, if elected president, to repeal ObamaCare via executive order.
Wait, what? The president overturn duly enacted legislation by fiat?
Found a quote from Mittens:
"The executive order would direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services and all relevant federal officials to return the maximum possible authority to the states to innovate and design health-care solutions that work best for them."
Weasel words for a declared intent to make an unconstitutional power grab of breathtaking chutzpah.
And this is a presumptive leader of the party that claims to cherish and defend the Constitution?
Lately it's seeming more and more as if our country has tipped into Bizarro World.
Posted by: janicket | May 12, 2011 at 10:27 AM