Romney Crashes And Burns On HCR Speech

I hope Mitt has good health care coverage because he's getting the shit kicked out of him today, from both the right and the left. And I'm enjoying every minute of it.

I'm not enjoying it because I dislike Romney. I actually think he wouldn't make a bad president. Sure, he's turned flip-flopping into an art form, but the bottom line for me is that he's not fucking insane like most of the rest of the GOP presidential field is. He's a moderate voice within the party.

Romney's problem, however, is that the GOP -- in response to the Obama presidency -- decided to go even further to the right than it was before the 2008 election, meaning that moderates like Romney are now viewed as the enemy. And that is what I find hysterically funny.

When Mitt passed RomneyCare in Massachusetts a few years back, he thought he had all sorts of GOP political cover. After all, the whole thing was originally a Republican idea:

*** [T]he last time Congress debated a health overhaul, when Bill Clinton was president, [Orrin] Hatch and several other senators who now oppose the so-called individual mandate actually supported a bill that would have required it.

In fact, says Len Nichols of the New America Foundation, the individual mandate was originally a Republican idea. "It was invented by Mark Pauly to give to George Bush Sr. back in the day, as a competition to the employer mandate focus of the Democrats at the time." ***

But we're not just talking ancient history here. As earlier reported on this blog, Jim Freaking DeMint supported individual mandates as recently as 2007, and so did Newt Gingrich. And, as noted here, a lot of other Republicans supported mandates at one time or another, including Robert Bennett, Christopher Bond, Robert Dole, Charles Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Richard Lugar, Alan Simpson, Arlen Specter, Daniel Coats, Judd Gregg, and Kay Hutchison.

Why have all these people suddenly flip-flopped on the individual mandate? Simple -- because Obama supported it, and the GOP made a group decision to aggressively oppose everything that Obama supported, even if it meant turning their backs on their own ideas.

I used to be critical of Obama for pushing a health care reform bill that was made up almost entirely of Republican ideas, but now I see the genius of it. I can't wait until the so-called liberal media finally gets off its ass and reports that folks like Jim DeMint and Newt Gingrich supported the individual mandate before they were against it.

By the way, this is pretty funny:

The Obama administration, on Friday, continued to apply a veritable death hug to likely Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, praising the health care law he passed as Massachusetts’ governor despite Romney’s insistence that there were major distinctions between his and the president’s approach.

“We have said before that health care reform that then Governor Romney signed into law in Massachusetts is in many ways similar to the legislation that resulted in the Affordable Care Act,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in an off-camera briefing at the White House. “And as to the issue of flexibility, as you know, earlier this year we made quite a big deal out of the fact that the president wanted to move up to 2014 … the starting point at which states can ask for waivers to opt out of the Affordable Care Act as long as they, of course, demonstrate their capacity with their own ideas to achieve the same objectives.”

“We wholly endorse flexibility and we obviously feel that Massachusetts took a smart approach towards health care reform,” the press secretary added. “Its provenance was so mainstream, there are great similarities between Massachusetts' law, the Affordable Care Act and legislation proposed by then Rhode Island Republican [Senator] John Chaffee in 1993.”

Wonderful.