Romney Describes Healthcare Mandate As Conservative Principle
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said the insurance mandate included in the Massachusetts healthcare law he signed is fundamentally a conservative principle.
Speaking Wednesday on “Fox and Friends,” Romney defended the Bay State’s healthcare law, which includes a version of the individual mandate, as inline with the Republican world view. The individual mandate was the centerpiece and most controversial aspect of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, which has widely been blasted by Republicans as governmental overreach.
“I’m happy to stand by the things that I believe. I’m not going to change my positions by virtue of being in a presidential campaign,” Romney said. “What we did was right for the people of Massachusetts, the plan is still favored there by 3 to 1 and it is fundamentally a conservative principle to insist that people take personal responsibility as opposed to turning to government for giving out free care.”
On Tuesday, Romney and rival Newt Gingrich jabbed at each other over the matter after The Wall Street Journal uncovered a 2006 memo in which Gingrich said he “agreed entirely” with Romney’s healthcare bill.
Buzzfeed also uncovered a 2008 video in which Gingrich passionately defended the idea of an individual mandate and called it “immoral” for those who can afford to have insurance not to buy it.
“I knew that [Gingrich] supported the plan in the past, and I believe he supported it until he got into the race this year, but maybe before that he changed his view,” Romney said. “Look, our plan was right for our state, and in my view it was based on conservative principles that frankly came from Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation, which was that instead of people relying on government to provide their care, they should take personal responsibility.”
But Gingrich said he now realizes that there are aspects of the law that are “unacceptable,” and that unlike Romney, he has the courage to say so.
“There are a lot of details of ‘Romneycare’ that are unacceptable,” Gingrich said Tuesday on CNN. “And the difference between me and Romney is I’ve concluded — and I’m prepared to say publicly — I’ve concluded, just as the Heritage Foundation did, that the idea didn’t work. Romney’s still defending the mandate that he passed.”
Both Romney and Gingrich have vowed to repeal Obama’s healthcare law if elected president.
Romney is battling Ron Paul for the lead in polls of Iowa voters less than a week before that state’s GOP caucus. Gingrich had been in the lead, but has faded under attack from Romney and other GOP candidates.
By: Jonathan Easley, The Hill, December 28, 2011
“To Know Mitt Romney Is To Dislike Him”: Those Who Saw Romney’s Leadership Up Close
There’s a traditional model for presidential candidates when it comes to their pre-announcement career trajectory. It’s pretty straightforward: an official gets elected to a prominent office, he/she does well, his/her constituents are impressed, and the official parlays that success into a national campaign.
In recent decades, this is the path Obama, Bush, Clinton, and Reagan all took from statewide office to the White House. It’s always fascinated me how poorly Mitt Romney fits this model.
He was governor from 2003 to 2007, and as Edward Mason and Tom Mashberg explained the other day, Romney failed to impress much of anyone.
“His favorability was basically a straight line down from his honeymoon,” said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk University’s Political Research Center and a longtime Massachusetts pollster. “Sometimes familiarity breeds contempt.” […]
Romney entered the Massachusetts State House in January 2003 with a flashy favorability rating of 61 percent…. By November 2004, voters were souring, and a Suffolk poll found his favorable rating had dropped to 47 percent.
A year later, that rating sank another 14 points. Just 33 percent of Bay State voters had a favorable opinion of Romney in 2005, according to Suffolk, while 49 percent were unfavorable.
Things did not improve in 2006, when Suffolk found that his unfavorable rating had risen to 55 percent while his favorable remained stagnant.
By November 2006, as he closed out his increasingly absentee term, his overall job approval rating had cratered to 36 percent.
Thomas Whalen, a Boston University political science professor, put it this way: “To know Mitt Romney is to dislike him. That is the moral of the story.”
Maybe he looks better in hindsight? No, Romney’s former constituents still don’t like him and still don’t want him to be president.
Maybe it’s because he was a GOP governor in a reliably “blue” state? No, Massachusetts has had plenty of modern Republican governors — Weld, Cellucci, Swift — and all were more popular with their Bay State constituents than Romney.
This is all generally overlooked, which is a shame because it seems pretty important. We’re talking about a politician who’s held public office just once, for a grand total of four years. During that one term, his constituents got a good look at his leadership, and came to actively dislike him.
Romney looked at this and thought, “Hey, now I’m ready for a promotion to the White House!”
This really ought to come up on the campaign trail more often. Here’s the sample question reporters can ask Romney: why were you so woefully unpopular with your own constituents when voters gave you a chance to lead?
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 11, 2011
Romney Acknowledges ‘Exaggeration’ On Health Care
Before this year, Mitt Romney was only too pleased to tout his health care reform law in Massachusetts as the basis for a national plan. He said he thinks his measure is “a good model for the nation”; he argued “we’ll end up with a nation that’s taken a mandate approach”; and he boasted that his plan “allows every citizen in America to get health insurance.”
All of this, however, was before 2011. Yesterday, in an interview with the editorial board of the Washington Examiner, Byron York pressed the former governor on this point.
YORK: But you wouldn’t recommend that any state adopt the plan that was adopted in Massachusetts in its entirety?
ROMNEY: In its entirety, no. But there are principles that I think that are helpful and instructive for the states to learn from and I think that there are other states that have picked up some portion of what we did. [emphasis added]
So we’ve gone from a Republican who believes his own plan is a good model for the nation to a Republican who wouldn’t even recommend other states follow his lead.
But in 2007, when Tim Russert asked about this specific point, Romney said, “I happen to like what we did. I think it’s a good model for other states. Maybe not every state but most.”
He was reminded of this yesterday.
YORK: Governor, on health care, you’ve often said that the health care plan that you’ve created in Massachusetts would be a good model for some other states. You said, “Maybe not every state, but most.”
ROMNEY: I don’t think I said “most,” but —
YORK: On “Meet the Press” in 2007.
ROMNEY: Oh did I? Did I make that exaggeration? [Laughs]
As Greg Sargent responded, “I get that Romney was joking, but still: He just described his own past assertion about the success of his signature accomplishment — one that’s now politically inconvenient for him — as an ‘exaggeration.’”
Imagine what the political world — specifically, campaign reporters — would do if John Kerry or Al Gore called their own rhetoric about their key policy priority an “exaggeration.” Voters would never hear the end of it.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 8, 2011
“Control, Alt, Delete”: Romney Staff Spent Nearly $100,000 To Hide Records
Mitt Romney spent nearly $100,000 in state funds to replace computers in his office at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2007 as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret, Reuters has learned.
The move during the final weeks of Romney’s administration was legal but unusual for a departing governor, Massachusetts officials say.
The effort to purge the records was made a few months before Romney launched an unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. He is again competing for the party’s nomination, this time to challenge Barack Obama for the presidency in 2012.
Five weeks before the first contests in Iowa, Romney has seen his position as frontrunner among Republican presidential candidates whittled away in the polls as rival Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, has gained ground.
When Romney left the governorship of Massachusetts, 11 of his aides bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers to keep for themselves. Also before he left office, the governor’s staff had emails and other electronic communications by Romney’s administration wiped from state servers, state officials say.
Those actions erased much of the internal documentation of Romney’s four-year tenure as governor, which ended in January 2007. Precisely what information was erased is unclear.
Republican and Democratic opponents of Romney say the scrubbing of emails – and a claim by Romney that paper records of his governorship are not subject to public disclosure – hinder efforts to assess his performance as a politician and elected official.
As Massachusetts governor, Romney worked with a Democrat-led state house to close a budget shortfall and signed a healthcare overhaul that required nearly all state residents to buy insurance or face penalties.
Massachusetts’ healthcare law became a model for Obama’s nationwide healthcare program, enacted into law in 2010. As a presidential candidate, however, Romney has criticized Obama’s plan as an overreach by the federal government.
Massachusetts officials say they have no basis to believe that Romney’s staff violated any state laws or policies in removing his administration’s records.
They acknowledge, however, that state law on maintaining and disclosing official records is vague and has not been updated to deal with issues related to digital records and other modern technology.
BUYING UP HARD DRIVES
Romney’s spokesmen emphasize that he followed the law and precedent in deleting the emails, installing new computers in the governor’s office and buying up hard drives.
However, Theresa Dolan, former director of administration for the governor’s office, told Reuters that Romney’s efforts to control or wipe out records from his governorship were unprecedented.
Dolan said that in her 23 years as an aide to successive governors “no one had ever inquired about, or expressed the desire” to purchase their computer hard drives before Romney’s tenure.
The cleanup of records by Romney’s staff before his term ended included spending $205,000 for a three-year lease on new computers for the governor’s office, according to official documents and state officials.
In signing the lease, Romney aides broke an earlier three-year lease that provided the same number of computers for about half the cost – $108,000. Lease documents obtained by Reuters under the state’s freedom of information law indicate that the broken lease still had 18 months to run.
As a result of the change in leases, the cost to the state for computers in the governor’s office was an additional $97,000.
Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Romney’s presidential campaign, referred questions on the computer leasing deal and records removal to state officials.
Last week, Saul claimed that Deval Patrick, the present Massachusetts governor and a Democrat, was encouraging reports about Romney’s records to cast the former governor as secretive. Patrick’s office has not responded to that allegation.
STATE REVIEWING RECORDS LAW
The removal of digital records by Romney’s staff, first reported by the Boston Globe, has sparked a wave of requests for state officials to release paper records from Romney’s governorship that remain in the state’s archives.
Massachusetts officials are now reviewing state law to determine whether the public should have access to those records.
The issue is clouded by a 1997 state court ruling that could be interpreted to mean that records of the Massachusetts governor are not subject to disclosure. Romney has asserted that his records are exempt from disclosure.
State officials and a longtime Romney adviser have acknowledged that before leaving office, Romney asked state archives officials for permission to destroy certain paper records. It is unclear whether his office notified anyone from the state before destroying electronic records.
Officials have said the details of Romney’s request to remove paper records, such as what specific documents he wanted to destroy, could be made public only in response to a request under the state’s freedom of information law. Reuters has filed such a request.
By: Mark Hosenball, Reuters; Editing, David Lindsey and David Storey, December 5, 2011
Mystery Man: Who Is Mitt Romney Conning?
Mitt Romney’s problem with the Republican Party is not just that he previously held liberal positions on a wide-ranging array of issues. That can be explained away, at least a bit, as pandering necessary to win votes in a Democratic state. The deeper problem is that Romney was promising behind closed doors to act as essentially a sleeper agent within the Republican Party, adopting liberal stances, rising to national prominence, and thereby legitimizing them and transforming the Party from within. Today’s Washington Post has more detail:
Mitt Romney was firm and direct with the abortion rights advocates sitting in his office nine years ago, assuring the group that if elected Massachusetts governor, he would protect the state’s abortion laws.Then, as the meeting drew to a close, the businessman offered an intriguing suggestion — that he would rise to national prominence in the Republican Party as a victor in a liberal state and could use his influence to soften the GOP’s hard-line opposition to abortion.
He would be a “good voice in the party” for their cause, and his moderation on the issue would be “widely written about,” he said, according to detailed notes taken by an officer of the group, NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts.
“You need someone like me in Washington,” several participants recalled Romney saying that day in September 2002, an apparent reference to his future ambitions.
That’s a very smart argument. Liberals have far more to gain by having a Republican advocate their views than by having a Democrat advocate their views. The article proceeds to detail meetings in which Romney told gay-rights activists the same thing:
In an Aug. 25, 1994, interview with Bay Windows, a gay newspaper in Boston, he offered this pitch, according to excerpts published on the paper’s Web site: “There’s something to be said for having a Republican who supports civil rights in this broader context, including sexual orientation. When Ted Kennedy speaks on gay rights, he’s seen as an extremist. When Mitt Romney speaks on gay rights he’s seen as a centrist and a moderate.
Now, conservatives can live with this if they think that once in office Romney will have to watch out for his right flank at all times. “Having flipped, he could not flop without risking a conservative revolt,” writes former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. “As a result, conservatives would have considerable leverage over a Romney administration.”
That’s not crazy. It’s also possible to believe Romney was simply conning liberals all along — that’s something he has hinted at in debates, referencing the fact that he was running in Massachusetts. (He couldn’t oppose abortion in Massachusetts — he’s running for office, for Pete’s sake.) Of course the risk of nominating a con artist is that there’s always the chance he’s conning you.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, November 3, 2011
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