Greg Sargent:
Restore Our Future, the well funded pro-Romney super PAC, has just released a blistering new ad in Iowa attacking Newt Gingrich. It pillories Newt on a number of issues, in an effort to show that he’s vulnerable in a general election and is not a true conservative.
But there’s one thing that’s mysteriously missing from the ad. A previous version of this spot — which leaked accidentally, and was quickly pulled down from YouTube by the super PAC — attacked Gingrich for having supported a national health insurance mandate.
In the newly-released spot — which retains every other attack on Gingrich that the earlier version contained — mention of the national mandate has vanished.
I can just imagine the conversation that must have gone down about the ad in the editing studio. "Hey, guys, we gotta slam Newt for supporting the individual mandate!" Heads nod all around, because everybody knows that Republicans think the individual mandate was—gasp!—President Obama's idea.
But then someone sheepishly raises a yellow flag: "You know, didn't Governor Romney sign the mandate into law in Massachusetts? And didn't he say MassCare should be a model for the nation ... and didn't he predict that eventually we'll end up with a nation that's chosen a mandate approach?" Now instead of heads nodding it's groans, but they know they have to take it out—because even though Newt Gingrich did support the individual mandate before Barack Obama ever ran for office, Mitt Romney actually signed it into law.