The best thing you can say about Mitt Romney’s roll- out week as an official candidate is that it wasn’t as bad as Newt Gingrich’s. He didn’t blow himself up on “Meet the Press” by denigrating Paul Ryan’s bold budget proposals, and he hadn’t racked up a half-million dollar tab at Tiffany to decorate his third wife.
But it was still awful.
First, Sarah Palin — the great white whale of campaign ’12 — showed up in Seabrook, NH, at the same time Romney was making his formal announcement in nearby Stratham. Toying with the media as she barnstormed the East Coast on her “One Nation” bus trip, she garnered the lioness’ share of the media coverage, leaving Mitt shouting boilerplate into the wind.
But Romney has much larger problems — and it’s not just RomneyCare anymore. Now Mitt’s stepped in it again with a defense of “manmade climate change.”
In a Granite State town-hall meeting last week, he said: “I believe the world’s getting warmer. I can’t prove that, but I believe, based on what I read . . . it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases.”
Ever Mr. Have-It-Both-Ways, Romney went on to say he’s against cap-and-trade, for alternative-energy sources and in favor of more domestic-oil drilling.
And there’s the problem with the Romney candidacy. Romney has flip-flopped on many of the crucial issues of the day, shifting to the right back in 2008 on abortion, stem-cell research and gay rights to satisfy a constituency he didn’t have to woo in Massachusetts. Even so, a weak candidate like John McCain beat him handily.
Now, he’s a can-do businessman, attacking Obama where he’s most vulnerable — the economy. Nothing’s wrong with that, but it hardly makes him unique among the field of presidential hopefuls. “It’s the economy, stupid,” is likely to be the mantra of every candidate heading into the Iowa caucuses.
And nobody else has RomneyCare, the unwitting prototype of ObamaCare that Mitt instituted in 2006 near the end of his single term as Massachusetts governor. It includes the so-called “individual mandate” to buy insurance that lies at the heart of conservative objections to the president’s national health-care reform. And in practice it’s not saving money, as promised, but hemorrhaging it.
Yet Romney has doubled down, defending his signature accomplishment on Tenth Amendment grounds, implausibly arguing that what worked (or didn’t work) in Massachusetts should not be extended to the whole country.
This misses a crucial point — it’s bad medicine for the nation or a single state. Just as they see “global warming,” Conservatives regard government-run health care not as the solution for a largely nonexistent problem, but as a power grab under the guise of “compassion.”
In other words, it’s not just about the program — it’s about the principle. That “business-savvy” Romney pushed it through tells us how much he really understands about how business and politics work.
And by buying into the global-warming cult, he’s just dug himself deeper.
There’s no doubt that Romney’s an attractive candidate. Leave aside his Mormon religion (which should be no more of a factor than was Obama’s middle name of Hussein); he’s bright, handsome and personable, with no embarrassing familial baggage.
But Mitt’s larger problem is unlikely to go away: People find him unconvincing, lacking in the urgency that these desperate times demand. And his preemptive sellouts suggest he’d treat Obama with kid gloves.
In short, Romney knows everything about running for president except why. And that’s the only question that matters.