Stephens: The GOP Deserves to Lose. The Success of Romney's Health-Care Pander. Last year, at the University of Michigan, Mitt Romney gave a speech on health care to address his prior support for the individual mandate—the linchpin for the Affordable Care Act and Romneycare in Massachusetts.
The core of his speech—and of his message on health care since then—was that it’s unacceptable for the federal government to require health insurance for its citizens. As he said: Our plan was a state solution to a state problem. And his is a power grab by the federal government to put in place a one size fits all plan across the nation. Of course, this isn’t true. It’s for that reason that, at the time, I was skeptical of this whole maneuver. Advertisement As it turns out, I was completely wrong.
As The New York Times put it, “Mr. It should be said that, before he flipped to the right in preparation for a presidential run, Romney insisted that his plan would make a good model for the country. If you want to know how Mitt Romney will govern, all you have to do is listen to him. Romney in Context. On October 1, 2010, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney described the genius of the American idea and lauded its results.
“No nation has done more to lift people out of poverty than this nation,” he said in remarks at Benedetto’s, an Italian restaurant in Tampa, Florida. “Our free enterprise system has lifted billions out of poverty.” Romney spoke at a “Reclaiming America Rally” for Marco Rubio, then a candidate for the Senate. It was one of three events Romney did that day with Rubio. The two men chatted in the kitchen before their remarks to a crowd that spilled into side rooms and out the restaurant’s front door. Romney worked Florida hard for years, laying the groundwork for his sweeping victory in the Republican primary on January 31, a contest in which he outpolled the combined total of the next two non-Romney candidates, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, by 20,000 votes. Romney’s victory in Florida came just 10 days after he lost badly to Gingrich in South Carolina. See Mitt Pander - Andrew C. McCarthy. Add class warfare to the list of contemporary political skills that Mitt Romney hasn’t quite mastered.
In a mere 18 hours, he managed first to step on his big Florida primary win with a lollapalooza of gaffes, declaring that he “was not concerned about the very poor.” Then, in the classic GOP style of doubling down on stupid to overcompensate for any hint of a compassion deficit, he called for raising the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation. Gee, Mitt, just for inflation? Why not double or maybe even quintuple the minimum wage? Such are the perils for a pandering pol, paddling the swirls of the welfare state without a constitutional compass. Romney being Romney, the first problem panicked him, while the second probably hasn’t even occurred to him — and won’t, unless Gingrich or Santorum surges and a little Tea Party stroking is suddenly in order.
It is, of course, impossible that a businessman as savvy as Mitt Romney does not grasp the wages of the minimum wage. Mitt does care. Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney?