Jim "Waterloo" DeMint Has A RomneyCare Problem

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) famously said in 2009 that "[i]f we're able to stop Obama on [health care reform], it will be his Waterloo. It will break him. . . ."

I have long been intrigued by the GOP opposition to Health Care Reform, particularly given that the bill finally enacted into law was full of Republican ideas and was essentially patterned after RomneyCare. But it never occurred to me that Senator Jim Freaking DeMint -- an Obama-hating radical right-winger who openly called for the "breaking" of the President over health care reform -- would have ever expressed support for anything like RomneyCare.

Well -- incredibly --he did (via TPM):

Flashback to January 2007. RomneyCare is such a well known achievement that Romney wins DeMint's endorsement because of the law's success.

"[Romney] has demonstrated, when he stepped into government in a very difficult state, that he could work in a difficult partisan environment, take some good conservative ideas, like private health insurance, and apply them to the need to have everyone insured," DeMint said. "Those kind of ideas show an ability to bring people together that we haven't seen in national politics for a while. We don't need the nation to be more polarized."

Then in February of that year DeMint explained on Fox News that Romney should do for America what he had done for Massachusetts with health care: "Well, that's something that I think we should do for the whole country."

Hilarious.