Mitt Romney gave a speech yesterday praising his own health care plan in MA and then denounced it at the same time and then promised to abolish HCR if he's elected as the next President. It's been pretty entertaining watching Romney come up with idiotic excuses why he's against Obama's health care since parts are so similar to his own. He's flip flopped so many times on a host of issues that hard core Tea Party activists like Katrina Pierson of Texas wants nothing to do with his candidacy and said as much to Tamryn Hall on MSNBC's NewsNation.
Hall: Is he trying to reinvent the past?
Pierson: It seems that he's trying to reinvent the past, but the reality of the situation is that Romney's sequel is that I apologized instead of no apology simply because now he's a walking hypocrite.
Hall: So basically you do not see him as a person I assume from those words should run for President to represent the Republicans against President Obama?
Pierson: No, absolutely not. The base of this movement, the conservative base the tea party movement, they're 100% against any type of government health care, RomneyCare, ObamaCare, it's all the same to us.
He has not once apologized for what he did and he will not admit that he was wrong ...
She also said that the Republican party should be aware that they won't come out and vote for him in 2012 and they should listen to the base. Most Republican insiders believe Romney is their best hope for the upcoming election since the current field looks like they are contestants from a 1970's game show.
In 2008, the so-called authenticity problem dogged him over his switchback positions on social issues such as abortion. Now it's health care. Where does the Mitt Romney who signed health care reform in Massachusetts with an individual mandate end, and where does the one denouncing President Obama's health care reform with an individual mandate begin?
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Substantively, Romney was also confusing. When Romney makes the case for what worked in Massachusetts, the uninitiated are likely to wonder why such a success shouldn't be a national model—like the one President Obama signed. Democratic spokesman Brad Woodhouse joked in a tweet to his colleague Hari Sevugan "Romney is making a great case for national health reform. Book him on cable tonight?
As for Romney's speech, Ezra Klein shares some thoughts:
So Romney is also saying that it’s un-American for the federal government to pass and impose an individual mandate. A violation of the 10th Amendment, don’cha know. His problem, of course, is that he didn’t mention the 10th Amendment when he, like so many other Republicans, was praising, passing and selling both state-based and national individual mandates in the 1990s and early-aughts.
So how exactly is he going to sum this up for the Republican primary? “The individual mandate is great policy, but as president, I pledge to oppose it”? “I believe in states’ rights first and a functional health-insurance market second”? As for the rest of the speech, it was vague and contradictory in the same places as his op-ed, so my analysis from yesterday holds up.
Vote for me because I'll repeal something I believe and passed, but I only passed it because I used my constituents as lab rats like Doctor Moreau did to test it out on my state. I'd never do that to other subjects. Are you confused? So are Republican voters.
