Victim of Romneycare ( The Michigan View 05.20.11)

Posted by hpayne on May 20, 2011

Donald Trump went out with a splash this week, finally announcing that his businessman-who-can-get-stuff-done candidacy was over. “People have a special place in their heart. . . for a guy who is a winner and gets things done and makes things work,” said Fox personality Bill O’Reilly in explaining the businessman candidate’s appeal. But don’t we already have a winning businessman with a reputation of getting things done? Wasn’t he the 2002 Olympic CEO? The successful captain of Bain Capital?

Wasn’t that the territory of Governor Mitt Romney? The Trump meteor is really the story of the failure of Romney to launch.

That’s not to say that this handsome, successful, Michigan favorite son won’t be competitive in 2012. But “competitive” is failure for a man who should have been the party standard-bearer by now. Instead, Romney’s gross miscalculation on Romneycare is choking his campaign and leaving his party desperate for alternatives—- Trump, Huntsman, Pawlenty, Daniels, Christie, Bachmann — anybody but Romney!

The once-Massachusetts governor stood alone after McCain-Palin crashed and burned in 2008. With a campaign under his belt, he was perfectly positioned to assume party leadership as the activist pol Barack Obama inevitably ran the ship aground with his radical, regressive, ’60s-style Keynesian agenda. Marooned on the beaches of Big Government, the nation — like Michigan before it — would scream for a captain of industry. Jennifer Granholm? Give me CEO Nerd! Barack Obama? Give me CEO Mitt!

But a funny thing happened on the way to the coronation. Romney stubbornly failed to evolve with the times.

Obamacare has changed everything, giving rise to a historic Tea Party movement that has led the GOP back to first principles — individual liberty and fiscal conservatism. Romney, meanwhile, seems frozen in time, boasting of his Massachusetts health reform even as its mandates and free-spending contradict the Republican principles of 2012.

Romneycare has been a disaster in Massachusetts — a harbinger of the future Obamacare nightmare.

“In 2006 (Romney) boldly stated: ‘Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the cost of health care will be reduced.’ Five years later, that prediction has proved false,” reports Sally Pipes at Forbes.com (a businessman’s publication!). “The Massachusetts experiment offers an ominous preview of what lies ahead for the rest of the nation under ObamaCare.”

Today, despite the hated individual mandate, over 100,000 remain uninsured. Patient wait lists are climbing. Costs are out of control. Massachusetts has leap-frogged other states to boast the highest premiums in the country. Massachusetts retailers report premiums have exploded 15 percent per year. And popular support for Romneycare is plummeting, down 200 percent since the law passed to 49 percent approval.

Romney, the savvy businessman, should have turned this to his advantage.

He had experimented with Obamacare in his own state (he rightly says states are incubators for reform) and found it wanting. Who knew better to tell of Obamacare’s flaws? Who better to proclaim universal coverage’s failure? Who better to warn of Frankenstein’s monster than Dr. Frankenstein himself?

Instead, Romney stubbornly clung to his creation.

For a potential president whose core argument is that he knows how to revive free market economic growth, this “mounts to a fatal flaw,” wrote the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Returning home to Michigan’s warm bosom this month to jumpstart his campaign, Romney only muddied the waters further — strangely taking credit for Romneycare’s autocratic mandates while vowing to repeal its federal twin. His commendable federal answer to Obamacare — extending the corporate tax break to individuals and liberating them from employer-dependent coverage — got lost in the contradiction. Romney sounded foolish.

The reviews were brutal.

“Former governor Mitt Romney may very well have hoped he could put health care behind him with his major speech in Ann Arbor,” wrote the National Review’s Grace Marie-Turner, “but by a margin of about seven to one, (National Review) readers said they thought the speech hurt him. It’s hard to hate Obamacare and love Romneycare.”

“The debate over ObamaCare may be the central question of the 2012 election. On that question, Mr. Romney is compromised and not credible,” wrote The Wall Street Journal in a devastating editorial titled “Obama’s running mate.”

These views were repeated by a chorus of conservative heavyweights: Krauthammer and Steyn and Barone and Barnes and Investor’s Business Daily and so on. Indeed, the only audience applauding was Romney’s enemies.

“That work inspired our own health-care plan,” said Mr. Obama’s top campaign strategist, David Axelrod, gleefully echoing other Democrats. “I think it’s been a great boon. He ought to be proud of it and he ought to embrace it.”

These are not the allies that will win you a Republican nomination.

Ironically, Romney will never win the GOP nomination without ditching Romneycare. The process will demand it. Better to have sent it to the bottom of the ocean long ago. Instead, it looks increasingly like he will sink with it.

 

 

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