Sargent: Romney's Lose-Lose Health Care Dilemma
Greg Sargent writes at The Washington Post:
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."
The omission has already attracted the bemused attention of conservative bloggers. Soren Dayton, for instance, Tweeted: "so was Romney the first candidate for 2012 to not mention the repeal of ObamaCare?"
The National Review's Jim Geraghty, meanwhile, snarked: "Look, as long as Obamacare isn't a big issue in the 2012 Republican presidential primary, Romney will be fine."
Romney, of course, passed a health plan as governor of Massachusetts containing an individual mandate, unaware that conservatives would soon decide that this once non-controversial policy tool constitutes the gravest threat to American liberty since King George the Third. It's now perhaps the gravest threat to his 2012 hopes, too.
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 Romneycare conundrum. But, amusingly, this has only succeeding in drawing more attention to it.
Romney is caught in a trap: Conservatives continue to demand he explain his heretical support for the mandate in order to persuade them he's not ideologically suspect. And yet, when Romney does try to justify his support for it -- or when he tries to paper over the problem by blustering hard about "Obamacare," something he conspicuously avoided doing today -- all that does is reinforce the sense that he's ideologically malleable and opportunistic.
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