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Mitt Romney faces a huge problem if he wants to be the GOP Presidential challenger to Obama for 2012. That problem is RomneyCare. Why is that a problem, you ask? Because his own health-care reform law that he signed into law in Massachusetts included a mandate, which is the heart of the Conservative/Tea Party criticism of Obama's health-care reform law, and they are waging war against it right now. He didn't even mention Obama's health-care bill at CPAC this year after going all red meat on the crowd.
Mitt Romney just wrapped up his speech at CPAC, and for someone who threw around all kinds of red meat attacks about the President -- the "Obama Misery Index," "Obama's Hoovervilles," etc. -- it's awfully strange that he said virtually nothing about the big one: "Obamacare.".
--He's tried various ways of getting around this vexing problem. He's argued that the mandate is a "conservative" solution, which makes it even more amusing that he avoided health care today. He has also cast the state-based mandate as a freedom-solution of sorts, arguing that while the federal mandate is borderline tyranny, state governments should have the right to pursue ideas as they see fit. These haven't washed with the right.
Implicit in this morning's right-leaning Tweets is the suggestion that Romney decided it would be easier not to talk about Obamacare today, in order to avoid calling attention to his Romney-care conundrum. But, amusingly, this has only succeeding in drawing more attention to it.
Yes, he's drawn more attention to it himself, but Conservative writers aren't helping either as they continually bring up RomneyCare when they try to handicap the Republican primaries.
So Romney is facing a conundrum: What should he do about RomneyCare? Here's what he came up with.
It's the Doctor Moreau defense.
"Our experiment wasn't perfect – some things worked, some didn't, and some things I'd change," Romney acknowledged in speaking to conservative activists at the Carroll County Lincoln Day Dinner in Bartlett, N.H.
“Our approach was a state plan intended to address problems that were in many ways unique to Massachusetts,” he said. “What we did there as Republicans and Democrats was what the Constitution intended for states to do – we were one of the laboratories of democracy.”
Andrea Mitchell asked in the above video if Mitt's newest ploy passed "the laugh test." It doesn't.
Experimenting on the health of the good people in MA is his defense? OMG. I fell off my chair when I saw this. There are at least 6,593,587 citizens living there using figures from 2009, and now he's calling the state one-big-laboratory. Wow. And he defended the individual mandate to the hilt as recently as 2011:
On the kick off to his "No Apology" book tour Mitt Romney is on message – refusing to apologize for the Massachusetts health care law that, like President Obama’s federal legislation, requires citizens to buy health insurance.
“I’m not apologizing for it, I’m indicating that we went in one direction and there are other possible directions. I’d like to see states pursue their own ideas, see which ideas work best,” Romney told me
.
See, no apology necessary for Mittens because he's the doctor. So his 'I was for it, but now I'm against it' defense hasn't held up and he's now a weird scientist who experimented on the human guinea pigs who voted for him. Good luck with that, Herr Doktor.
