For weeks, I have been seeing comments posted on items about the GOP primaries repeating the same question over and over again: Why are none of the candidates hitting Mitt Romney where he is weakest with the healthcare argument. Well, it looks like now that Newt Gingrich is getting his day in the sun, he may be ready for a first strike.
Gingrich released his entitlements reform plan, with little brouhaha for a candidate who is suddenly topping polls. In the plan, Newt hits Romney where is may hurt the must among GOP primary voters: the mandate. Forget that Newt was for the mandate before he was against it. He swears that he changed his mind about the mandate and that he was so, so wrong about it before. This is apparently because the mandate is now a liberal idea (even though it came from the fine folks at the Heritage Foundation?).
In his entitlement plan, Newt states:
"Individual and employer mandates are bad policy leading down the road to socialized medicine, whether the mandates are adopted at the federal level, or the state level,"
That's right, we've brought back that boogeyman from yestermonth, socialized medicine. Big scary bureaucrats ready to kill Granny if the wrong box is checked on her SF-183298347ABCD Part X form. We'll see if this argument sticks with voters the way it did in 2010 in the midterms, but that pseudo-argument may be running out of steam with voters more concerned with the economy than with having to buy health insurance 2 years down the road.
Perhaps the most important thing that Gingrich accomplished in attacking the mandate is in making Mitt Romney talk about it. In fact, he got Romney to defend the mandate. Romney was quoted as saying, in reference to the individual mandate:
"Now, what we did isn't perfect," Romney added. "Some parts of it worked, some didn't, some things I would change. But it's not like it's a liberal idea. It was a conservative concept.
So now Mitt has gone from being for the mandate, to against the mandate, to sort of for the mandate? Newt may have just found the best way to destroy Romney: make him keep talking about the mandate.
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