Romney's Sticking by Romneycare

It's conventional wisdom that the Dems' health bill has hurt Romney's 2012 bid. But lately, he's been providing a stout defense of his Mass. health reforms.

It has become conventional wisdom that the passage of President Obama's health care reform measure killed Mitt Romney's White House ambitions. The Connector program in Massachusetts served as a blueprint for the President's initiative, and Romney has long defended his individual mandate. As the 2012 campaign approaches, Romney's choices seemed as bad as a new Nick Cage movie: either he would defend the individual mandate (and, by extension, Obamacare) or reverse course, reinforcing his position as the right's very own John Kerry, a Bay State flip-flopper with fine hair.

On Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos, Romney wound up and tossed a knuckle-curve. He denounced the Obama plan and asserted his opposition to the individual mandate as a national cure-all. But he also stoutly defended the individual mandate he imposed in Massachusetts.

Confusing? Not at all. Romney went on to defend the Massachusetts mandate as a legitimate function of a state government, since the states have powers that the Federal government does not. This is absolutely true. Unlike the Federal government (limited to enumerated powers), the states have the so-called "police power", the ability to enact laws to protect the health, safety, morals and welfare of their citizens. The most rabid Tea Partier and fervent commerce clause expansionist would have to cede this one.

The former governor also hinted at his preferred health care system, a scenario where all fifty states have their own programs, mandate or no. After all, he reasoned, even though a mandate may have been the right call for Massachusetts, he would "like to see states pursue their own ideas, see which ideas work best." And so Romney positioned himself as a champion of the United States as a federalist nation; a shrewd play to the GOP base, which has long fetishized the Tenth Amendment.

Romney is not out of the woods yet. He still needs to explain to the anti-mandate base why any individual mandate is a good thing, and tap-dance his way around the argument that requiring the purchase of health insurance is akin to requiring the purchase of a car. Furthermore, the argument that we ought to have fifty state health care programs may not be much of a winner in a general election. Like it or not, most voters seem to consider health care a national problem that demands a national solution.

That said, for a politician who has been thoroughly unconvincing at his attempts to cover-up his past positions and wriggle his way to the right, Mitt Romney did a splendid job here.  Hats off, Governor.

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