How weird has it gotten in the GOP presidential field this year? This weird:
Mitt Romney is making it official. No, not that he’s officially running for the White House. (That will come soon enough.) That he really, really doesn’t like the health care reforms President Obama signed into law last year.
“If I am elected president, I will issue on my first day in office an executive order paving the way for waivers from ObamaCare for all 50 states,” Romney writes in an op-ed in Thursday’s USA Today. “Subsequently, I will call on Congress to fully repeal ObamaCare.”
The former Massachusetts governor will take his show on the road later Thursday, when he lays out his five-part health care alternative in person at an afternoon speech at the University of Michigan’s Cardiovascular Center.
The event is Romney’s most direct attempt yet to address what is widely seen as his biggest political liability: his work as governor to establish universal health-care coverage in Massachusetts…
Poor Romney. His chief virtue is that he tried, way out ahead of most of the country, to address our chief domestic challenge. And he showed that he understood one of the fundamentals of ANY reform with a chance of doing any good, that a mandate would have to be part of it. And now, to remain viable in a party that has charged over a cliff into an irrational vacuum on the issue, he has to run from that achievement.
Pretty sad.
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Pretty sure this video won’t be referenced on anyone’s campaign site this time around.
It’s stunning to watch this, four years later. It’s like that episode of Star Trek where the alternate universe was just the opposite of the real one:
Andrew, that video was stunning. DeMint was singing the praises of Romney’s health care plan for MA and suggesting other other state’s adopt it. Obamacare did just that so now what are folks like DeMint saying? Seriously this is the kind of pure partisan hackery that Brad rails about. If a Republican proposes something it must be good. If a Democrat implements exactly the same thing it must be bad. Stunning, simply stunning.
Kudos to John McCain. As a man who was tortured it is certainly to be expected that his opinion on the matter should carry considerable weight. That is why I was extremely dissapointed in his rather uneven opposition to the practice during the 2008 campaign. But now it appears the John McCain of 2000 is back and he is now vigorously slamming his GOP collegues for suggesting that “enhanced interrogation” techniques helped find Bin Laden. I applaude this display of candor. Maybe McCain will return to his Mavericky ways as we go forward. That would be refreshing.
Oops, forgot to provide the link to my source on that item. It’s there now…
Thanks for saying that about McCain, Bud. I was going to do a post giving him props for that, but I figured you and Doug would just scoff at it. I need to have more faith in people…
And yeah, you’re right about the madness of partisanship. Although with DeMint it goes deeper. There are the Republicans HE approves, and then everybody else.
I need to go back and check video I have of DeMint, during a visit to The State in 08, saying why he backed Romney…
I wouldn’t scoff at McCain returning to telling the truth versus toeing the party line in order to get elected.
Maybe ending torture is another one of those little things that America will eventually add to the list of exceptional accomplishments. Or maybe just stopping the practice of lying about what really happened.
And if the Mayo Clinic is against Obamacare, I’m sure it must be a purely political response.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110511/ap_on_he_me/us_health_care_setback
“But in an unusual rebuke, an umbrella group representing premier organizations such as the Mayo Clinic wrote the administration Wednesday saying that more than 90 percent of its members would not participate, because the rules as written are so onerous it would be nearly impossible for them to succeed.
“It’s not just a simple tweak, it’s a significant change that needs to be made,” said Donald Fisher, president of the American Medical Group Association, which represents nearly 400 large medical groups around the country providing care for roughly 1 in 3 Americans. Its members, including the Cleveland Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah, and Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, had been seen as the vanguard for accountable care.”