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Before his health care speech was done yesterday, Mitt Romney was already getting pilloried.
The tortured logic inherent in repudiating ObamaCare while defending RomneyCare was too much for too many.
For instance, Jonah Goldberg offered this:
The essence of Romney’s position is: I stand by my successful healthcare plan in Massachusetts, but ObamaCare is a disaster because it does all of the things that RomneyCare does, just on a national level. So, if I am elected president I will give waivers to states so they can repeat my mistakes if they want to, or, if they are smart, they will reject both my approach and Obama’s.
Philip Klein summarized the speech this way:
Most notably, Romney supported the individual mandate, which he again defended today, arguing that it was put in place to combat free riders. But that's precisely the argument the Obama administration is making, not only publicly, but in federal court to combat challenges to its constitutionality...Even worse, because the plans are so similar in structure, every time Romney defends his Massachusetts law, it is a de facto defense of the national health care law.
This was all after the Wall Street Journal dissed Romney Thursday morning at length as a flawed public executive on account of his health care reforms.
The health care speech is emblematic of a larger problem for Romney: the world has changed a lot since he began running for President, but he has not.
He began unofficially running for president in 2006 and officially declared in February 2007. He only took a short hiatus after the 2008 primaries and general election, and before long, he was back at it, aiming for 2012. But he still seems the same candidate that was running back before mid-2008 in a world that's quite different than it was then:
ObamaCare happened. As many have pointed out, that fundamentally changes Romney-the-candidate, even if Romney doesn't quite see it that way. His USA Today op-ed and his speech on Thursday pushed all the right conservative buttons on tax credits for insurance purchases and buying across state lines and such. Pretty much every Republican primary contender will advocate the same policies. But there's one big difference. No one else created RomneyCare. So, all things being equal, Romney suffers.
The financial crisis happened. Romney seems relatively similar now to the Romney that ran before the financial crisis. He offers no distinctives. He has offered no "red menace" speech as Mitch Daniels did, no serious power point presentations like Paul Ryan's. In other words, whereas others have used their public leadership to respond to America's darkest fiscal realities, he seems to be using his public position - to run for President.
The states' fiscal crisis happened. Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, together with newcomes like Scott Walker and John Kasich, have emerged on the scene as tough, thick-skinned governors willing to take on the interests that threaten their states' fiscal future. Romney's tenure as governor was consumed with other themes. Unfortunately, the main other theme was RomneyCare. The bottom line is that his gubernatorial experience adds little to his appeal, much less now than in 2008. A candidate's gubernatorial experience isn't all that matters, but it matters quite a bit in the intangible "gravitas" category.
Romney's health care speech yesterday set him back. It didn't set him apart from the other contenders, since most will advance similar policy views on health care. It ended up portraying him as the candidate with excess baggage, whom time and events are passing by.
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