Once upon a time, Mitt Romney liked health insurance mandates. Then he started sucking up to the new Republican orthodoxy.

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Over the past several years, Mitt the Moderate has contorted himself to the point where he's been caving in on himself like a black hole. And, as with a black hole and light, no particle (or even wave) of credibility can escape.

This is especially true with health-care reform.

As you probably know, when he was governor of Massachusetts Romney advocated and signed into law a reform package that is basically the precursor of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), what's come to be known as Romneycare, or Masscare. Once upon a time, pre-Obama, that was the standard (and orthodox) Republican position on health-care reform, a market-based system with an individual mandate.

But of course that is no longer the standard Republican position, and so Romney, as part of his larger effort to remake himself as a conservative with sufficient ideological fervor to appeal to the Republican base in order to win the party's presidential nomination, has had to lie, lie, lie his way out of his own past. Here's Jon Chait:

In 2009, Mitt Romney had a problem. He was running for the Republican presidential nomination, and the towering achievement of his governorship in Massachusetts — health-care reform — had been embraced by President Obama. Romneycare played almost no role in Romney's 2008 presidential run, but the emergence of the issue onto the national agenda threatened to link Romney with a president Republicans had already come to loathe.

His solution was simple. He seized upon the one major difference between his plan and Obama's, which was that Obama favored a public health insurance option. The public plan had commanded enormous public attention, and Romney used to it frame Masscare as a conservative reform relying on private health insurance, and against Obama's proposal to create a government plan that, Romney claimed, would balloon into a massive entitlement. Andrew Kaczynski collects several televised appearances and one op-ed in which Romney holds up Masscare as a national model.

This tactic backfired when Obama had to jettison the public plan, and Republicans came to focus on the individual mandate as the locus of evil in Obamacare. What was once a Republican idea in good standing was now, suddenly, unconstitutional and the greatest threat to freedom in American history.

This left Romney in an awkward spot.

It's hard to run for president as the advocate of an idea that your party considers the greatest threat to freedom in history. His response was to simply revise the past, much as he did with abortion. Romney now claimed he had never advocated a federal version of his Masscare program.

Ah, but of course he did, and we have more than enough evidence to prove it. Like, for example, when he said during a 2008 Republican debate that he doesn't just like mandates but thinks they're fine for national health care:

Charles Gibson (moderator): But Governor Romney's system has mandates in Massachusetts, although you backed away from mandates on a national basis.

Romney: No, no, I like mandates. The mandates work.

Fred Thompson: I beg your pardon? I didn't know you were going to admit that. You like mandates.

Romney: Let me -- let me -- oh, absolutely.

Yes, that's Fred Thompson, awake and engaged enough to be astonished that Romney would be so honest about supporting mandates.

And it didn't stop if 2008. Kaczynski shows that Romney thought his Masscare could be a model for national reform well into 2009, that is, even after Obama became president. And he has three clips to prove it. Sure, Romney was against a public option, but he was for Masscare as a national program and specifically for the individual mandate.

All of which is to say, Romney's more recent denials and contortions, claiming that he never thought Masscare was a model for national reform, including the mandate, amount to a massive lie, self-rejection for the sake of courting votes, a shameless pander to the new far-right orthodoxy of the Republican Party.

Just what you'd expect, in other words, from Willard Mitt Romney.

(photo)

Elizabeth Warren needs to relax

By Richard K. Barry

That's more like it.

I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Warren, who is running for a Massachusetts Senate seat for the Democrats against Republican incumbent Scott Brown. I like her message. She articulates the plight of the middle class very well and understands what has to be done to improve it. She's obviously really smart and an asset to the party. But she is clearly new to this whole "politics" thing, and it showed in her interview with Jon Stewart a couple of nights ago.

It's much better to be calm and apparently in control on television. Something about it being a "cool medium." Ms. Warren was vibrating in the interview, way too excited, and, to be truthful, it was a little hard to watch.

I don't mean to be hard on her. As I said, I think she's terrific, but someone needs to work with her to help her get more of the optics right. Hey, politics is performance art.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren demand ceasefire on third-party spending in Mass. Senate race

By Richard K. Barry

Hard to know what to make of this, but it seems that Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown and his Demcratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren, agree that there should be a ceasefire on third-party spending in the state's Senate race.

As Politico says:

Senior officials from Brown's and Warren's campaigns will soon meet to try to craft an unusual pact to curtail the influence of so-called super PACs that have grown in power since the Supreme Court's Citizens United case loosened campaign finance rules in 2010.

Warren has indicated that she would like to be able to run her campaign and, presumably, be responsible for the content of the ads run in her support feeling, perhaps, that voters might start to punish her if they got tired of the mudslinging.

For his part, Scott Brown has stated:

I think by sending a joint message to stay out, I'm hopeful they'll [the Super PACs] accept that message. This is going to be decided by the people of Massachusetts, not by the tens of millions of outside interest dollars coming to our state.

While federal law doesn't allow campaigns to coordinate with outside groups, it may be possible, as Warren has said, "to agree on a common response if third-party groups become active on the airwaves and ignore their demands."

The problem, of course, is that outside groups would have little incentive to listen to the very candidates they are supposed to be helping, unless they can be convinced that their unwanted intervention is helping their opponents.

This is one of the, perhaps, unintended consequences of the Citizens United case, that it would be almost impossible to fully coordinate message discipline in a campaign. The supportive Super PAC may have one agenda or strategic approach and the candidate another, which may not work well together. For example, if a candidate wants to run a fairly positive campaign but a Super PAC wants to sling mud, most voters won't make the distinction about the source of the attacks.

Maybe this is all bullshit on the part of both Warren and Brown, who might just want to give themselves distance from some of the uglier things said in their names, and I don't wan't to be too naive about how closely all of this is coordinated. I'm simply saying that it raises issues.

Campaigns used to be about message discipline and this really could screw that up in unexpected ways.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Behind the Ad: Newt Gingrich hits "Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney" over abortion

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(Another installment in our new "Behind the Ad" series.)

Who: Newt Gingrich attacks Mitt Romney

Where: South Carolina.

What's going on: Well, he said it was coming, an all-out offensive against Romney in South Carolina, a last-ditch effort to tear down the frontrunner and likely nominee and to resurrect his campaign.

Assuming it really does materialize, a lot of it will be about Bain Capital, where Romney set about making millions destroying jobs and ruining lives, but of course that leaves open the charge -- a huge problem in a hyper-capitalist party like the GOP, where the slightest bad word about capitalism amounts to indefensible heresy -- that Gingrich is anti-capitalist. (What he's really doing is advocating an ethical capitalism inimical to the unregulated capitalism that Romney exploited and is defending now, but Republicans like their plutocrats to be self-aggrandizing looters with no regard for the consequences.).

In South Carolina, though, the opening against Romney is really on the social conservative front, and Newt and others, like Santorum, will no doubt focus a great deal of their energy in the coming days on Romney's fairly progressive (at least by Republican standards) past, including on key wedge issues like abortion. Hence this ad, which accuses Romney of having "governed pro-abortion" in Massachusetts:

Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney: He can't be trusted.

That's a powerful message that hasn't gotten much of an airing so far in the Republican race, what with the various non- and anti-Romneys so often turning their fire on each other instead of on Romney. It may not be enough to knock Romney off his perch, what with the conservative opposition deeply divided and with neither Gingrich nor Santorum possessing the broad appeal or clear electability that one would need to mount a serious challenge at this point in the campaign, particularly with most of the party elites in Romney's corner, but if pressed enough it could resonate strongly with the many Republicans uncomfortable with the thought of Romney as their party's nominee, particularly in a state like South Carolina.

If nothing else, though, it highlights one of Romney's glaring weaknesses, one that Democrats will no doubt seek to exploit come general election time. If he embraces or even acknowledtges his progressive past, he picks up independents but loses vital conservative support. But if he continues to run to the right, as he will have to do as long as this conservative challenge continues, he risks further alienating the center and losing whatever lingering credibility he may have with non-Republicans. One thing he'll try to do is avoid having to talk about issues like abortion altogether, focusing instead on jobs and the economy (while lying about his ugly record at Bain) and smearing Obama as an anti-American socialst Europhile (while playing up American exceptionalism in a shameless appeal to knee-jerk, delusional patriotism), but there's not much he can do as long as these conservative efforts to expose him as a faux conservative continue.

Scott Brown: Massachusetts moderate

By Richard K. Barry

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama nominated former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Of course, a bunch of Republicans feigned outrage with Obama for sidestepping the Senate with this recess appointment, as if such manoeuvring hasn't been the approach taken by presidents of all parties over the years. But who needs facts when you are mostly all about being indignant?

The most interesting part of all this is that Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown decided to support Obama, much to the annoyance of his own party. As he said:

I support President Obama's appointment today of Richard Cordray to head the CFPB. I believe he is the right person to lead the agency and help protect consumers from fraud and scams. While I would have strongly preferred that it go through the normal confirmation process, unfortunately the system is completely broken. If we're going to make progress as a nation, both parties in Washington need to work together to end the procedural gridlock and hyper-partisanship.

Gee, I wonder if this had anything to do with the fact that the Democratic challenger for his Massachusetts Senate seat is Elizabeth Warren, the president's first choice to lead the agency?

That's what you get when you're a Republican trying to hold onto a Senate seat in a generally liberal state going into a presidential election cycle that will surely bring out a lot of Democrats on election day. You try to out-progressive your progressive opponent. 

Could Brown be one those "Massachusetts moderates" Newt Gingrich likes so much to talk about? Why, those people will say anything!

Everywhere else in the country, the GOP panders to the right. In Massachussets, it panders to the left. 

Give him credit, his campaign spokesman is spinning hard as he said this about Brown:

Scott Brown promised to be an independent voice when he ran in 2010, and he is keeping that promise. He looks at every issue on the merits and does what he thinks is best for Massachusetts and America regardless of partisan politics.

I'm just not sure this is the election for independent minded Republicans to be hawking their wares. More like, "be a true believer or be gone."

Like the old joke: "The only thing you get by standing in the middle of the road is run over." Truer words were never spoken for Republicans this time around. 

Bye, Scott.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Will the real Mitt Romney please stand up, please stand up?

By Michael J.W. Stickings (@mjwstickings)

Via twitter: 

"Weird that Romney uses climate change to hit Newt. As MA gov, Mitt boasted that his climate plan was 'one of the nation's strongest.'"

-- David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod)

Sure, but back then he was just foolin'. You know, saying what he had to say and doing what he had to do to get elected in a crazy left-wing state. Or so he tells us.

(It was all just an act of necessary political contortion. Or maybe he really was something of a moderate progressive and then changed, either genuinely or calculatedly, when he went national. He can't quite get his story straight.)

There's no way he's doing the same thing now to suck up to the base of a truly crazy right-wing party in hopes of foolin' it into trusting him with its presidential nomination.

Right?