Below The Fold

A while back, I opined that I didn’t really agree with the larger sentiment Mitt Romney’s signing of Romneycare in Massachusetts was necessarily going to doom his chances to win the Republican nomination in 2012. After reading this response to a Newsweek interviewer though, consider me converted:

Back in February 2007, you said you hoped the Massachusetts plan would “become a model for the nation.” Would you agree that it has?

I don’t … You’re going to have to get that quote. That’s not exactly accurate, I don’t believe.

I can tell you exactly what it says: “I’m proud of what we’ve done. If Massachusetts succeeds in implementing it, then that will be a model for the nation.”

It is a model for the states to be able to learn from. During the campaign, I was asked if I was proposing that what I did in Massachusetts I would do for the nation. And the answer was absolutely not. Our plan is a state plan. It is a model for other states—if you will, the nation—it is a model for them to look at what we’ve accomplished and to better it or to create their own plans.

The issue here isn’t so much the fact that Romney signed a bill similar to the Affordable Care Act while he was Governor of Massachusetts, it’s that he simply hasn’t learned his lesson from 2008. To be blunt, from August to November 2007, the nomination was Romney’s to lose. And lose it he did. Romney’s problem was a pretty simple one; he expeded too many resources and energy trying to appeal to all elements of the conservative movement, rather than identifying a particular base of support and charting a path to the nomination by riding those voters through a very crowded field. This manifested itself most obviously in Iowa, where the nominating caucuses are disproportionately dominated by evangelicals on the GOP side, and where Romney tried to re-invent himself as a committed social conservatives. His part positions on social issues made this unbelievable, to say the least, and at the end of the day evangelicals simply weren’t willing to vote for a Mormon either. The overall effect of this was to hand Romney a defeat in Iowa, weakening him in New Hampshire, where McCain was already surging by occupying the ground a right-ward trending Romney had vacated. Had Romney stuck to a more socially moderate, economically conservative, business candidate and written off Iowa, he could have won New Hampshire, knocking McCain out in the process, easily won Michigan and Nevada, and then knocked Giuliani out by winning Florida, setting up a head to head showdown with Huckabee on Super Tuesday, which Romney would have won handily, delivering him the nomination in basically the same fashion McCain won it.

For his current predicament, well, Romney has really stepped in it. But to put it bluntly, running away from Romneycare simply isn’t a viable strategy. It’s not like Romney can hide from it, and as you would hope he learned from his last debacle, the things he’s said in public are easily retrievable now. I suppose he’s at least trying to couch the difference between his reform and Obama’s in federalist terms, but it seems to me that only works if you imagine the conservative base is only upset that it’s the federal government implementing the policy, and would be fine with states doing it, which seems unlikely. The only chance Romney has to survive this is to own his record and defend it. That means articulating why the mandate is necessary, and basically supporting the core elements of the bill, while finding someting more peripheral, like the funding mechanisms, to attack. Is that strategy a bit of a hail mary? Absolutely, but it’s better than unconvincingly running from his own record and lying about what he’s said in the past, which will eventually just end up alienating him from everyone. At least standing by his record to some degree gives him a chance to win some supporters. And Romney has the advantage of being able to talk rings around the other likely candidates for the 2012 nomination on economic matters, plus a legitimate background in business to reinforce his capitalist credentials. The problem is that he’ll actually have to grow something of a background, and stop looking for ways to appeal to get the vote of every Republican in the country.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney

by Brien Jackson

There’s a growing meme lately that the passage of the healthcare bill spells doom for Mitt Romney’s chance to win the Republican Presidential nomination. Basically the idea is that the Republican base has been whipped into a froth of opposition to “Obamacare,” and since Romney signed a program that’s essentally the same as the Affordable Care Act in Masachusetts, he’s not going to be able to win support in the Republican primary. The latest articulation I’ve seen came fron Ben Smith this morning, who compares the healthcae issues potential cost to Romney to the impact support for the Iraq War had on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

For my part, I’m pretty skeptical of this. For one thing, 2012 is pretty far away. And yes, the early parts of the cycle are only a year away, but that aspect of the campaign is dominated by fundraising, which I doubt Romney will have trouble with. The Chamber of Commerce isn’t interested in fighting ove repeal of the bill, PhRMA and providers endorsed it, and non-healthcre businesses don’t really have much of a reason to care about it now that it’s passed. So I very much doubt that the economic interests who fund Republcan campaigns are going to find it much reason to cut off Romney. As far as the Republican electorate goes, I think the idea that they’re going to reject Romney 3 years ago because of his healthcare plan imputes a little too much intellectual sophistication onto the masses. For one thing, it could have been an issue in 2008 as well, when Hillary Clinton was proposing to basically take the Massachusetts system nationwide, but it never really came up, even though it’s not like Democratic plans for universal healthcare were only noticed on the right last year. Indeed, from 1993 to 2008, conservatives used “Hillarycare” as a short-hand for “Socialized medicine.” So the fact that it didn’t hurt Romney in 2008 bodes well for him in 2012. There’s also the fact that Romney can issue some mealy-mouth hedging about “states” and so forth that should buy him enough room to pivot to something else.

If anything, I think the Hillary/Iraq comparison is pretty good, but probably not for the same reason Smith does. Was her initial support for the Iraq War a drag on Clinton’s campaign? Sure. Did it cost her the nomination? Probably not. Compared to investing as much capital in Iowa as they did, even though she was at a distinct disadvantage in the state, and having absolutely no plan for a contest going past Super Tuesday or any kind of campaign presence in the contests between February 5 and March 4, I’d say it’s pretty low on the list of factors that could plausibly be said to have cost Clinton the campaign. What it did do was give her opponents particularly Obama, an early and consistent opening from which to attack her. And that’s probably about all this will do to Romney. Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty and John Thune or whomever is running will be able to respond to Romney’s attacks on the ACA by pointing out that he signed something similar in Massachusetts, but whether or not that proves devastating remains to be seen. For now, I don’t see any evidence that Romney is facing a backlash from the leadership of the conservative movement, which leads me to think it probably won’t hurt him much with the rubes either.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney