So how will conservatives receive Mitt Romney's
health care speech defending himself for having supported the individual heath insurance mandate? Well, if the
Wall Street Journal editorial board is a leading indicator (and it is), the answer can be summed up in one word: abysmally.
They write:
It's no accident that RomneyCare's most vociferous defenders now are in the White House and left-wing media and think tanks. They know what happened, even if he doesn't.
For a potential President whose core argument is that he knows how to revive free market economic growth, this amounts to a fatal flaw. Presidents lead by offering a vision for the country rooted in certain principles, not by promising a technocracy that runs on "data." Mr. Romney's highest principle seems to be faith in his own expertise.
More immediately for his Republican candidacy, the debate over ObamaCare and the larger entitlement state may be the central question of the 2012 election. On that question, Mr. Romney is compromised and not credible. If he does not change his message, he might as well try to knock off Joe Biden and get on the Obama ticket.
Setting aside the policy substance of the WSJ editorial, politically it reflects what many of us have been saying for a long time now: Mitt Romney is toast in the GOP primary. His only way out is to repudiate everything he's done in Massachusetts. But if he does that and somehow manages to win the primary, he'll be unelectable in the general. Nobody will believe a word he says. (Not that they believe him now.)
Most Republican operatives will probably blame Romney for this mess. But the real problem here is that Republican conservatives have moved so far to the right in the past couple of years that many of them honestly believe Mitt Romney should run on President Obama's ticket. That's an insane proposition. But from the party that nominated Joe Miller, Sharron Angle, and Christine O'Donnell, it's not exactly a shock.
