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Opinions/Editorials Title: The Mitt Mirage I first met Mitt Romney in 2005. I was very impressed. I described him in this magazine as "informal, conversational, enthusiastic and speedy." Mitt Romney? Yes, indeed. But then, we were talking about something he really believed in, or seemed to: his universal health care plan for Massachusetts, which included an individual mandate--an idea I'd admired since it was proposed by Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation in 1989. Romney's plan wasn't the Full Butler, which would eliminate the deductibility of employer-donated health care benefits. But it was a huge step in the right direction, and Romney had mastered every detail of it. He seemed a near Clintonian policy wonk, a guy who certainly wouldn't have offered the disingenuous comments about health care that Romney did Sept. 9 on Meet the Press. In an attempt to sidle toward the center, Romney said he would embrace aspects of the Obama health care plan, like the mandate for insurance companies to cover all comers, including those with pre-existing conditions. Let us leave aside for a moment the well-known fact that Obamacare is, at its core, Romneycare taken national--and Romneycare taken national was the fondest hope of the fellow I met in 2005. What annoyed me was that, for the umpteen-hundredth time in this campaign, Romney was playing dumb on a subject he knew extremely well. His health care scheme and Obama's were dual-mandate plans. The insurance companies had to cover everyone, and the government had to require everyone to buy into the system. The insurers needed the larger pool of healthy policyholders to offset the cost of covering those who were already sick. And so I was prepared to whap poor Romney upside the head for this phony concession. But then Romney retracted it. Or an anonymous campaign aide did, saying Romney "was not proposing a federal mandate to require insurance plans to offer those particular features." And there, my fellow Americans, you have it: the Romney campaign in full flight yet again, embarrassed yet again. This is terribly sad. The guy I met in 2005 had potential. But the guy who ran for President in 2008 ran away from the guy I met in 2005, and the guy who's running this time has been even worse. He has made a public fool of himself, and it's important to ask why. Romney's health gaffe came at a moment of peril for his candidacy. His party's convention had failed to lift him and would be remembered eternally for Clint Eastwood's empty chair. The Democratic convention, by contrast, had been extremely successful, even if Obama's speech wasn't. Indeed, the Obama people seem to have a far more sophisticated sense of how to run a campaign than the Romney people do. The Obama campaign remembered what Karl Rove had done to John Kerry in 2004 and performed an early advertising demolition job on Romney, defining him throughout the summer. Romney's campaign responded with an ad blitz in early September, "but there are diminishing returns for ads that run during the general-election campaign," a Republican strategist told me. "The public has been inundated." The result was that assorted underemployed Republican talking heads and political consultants launched a schadenfreude feeding fiesta. The Romney campaign was inept, insubstantial, panicky, heading down the drain, they said, sounding almost as the Democrats did about Kerry in 2004. It was premature, of course. Kerry won the first debate with George W. Bush that year and made the race close for a minute or two. Romney could do the same this year; he might even win. The Obama cool train could suffer from exogenous setbacks. The economy could tank. October is sometimes a volatile month for the stock market. Joe Biden could run off with that biker woman who sat on his lap. But I suspect Romney won't do so well in the debates for the same reason that he didn't do so well on Meet the Press. It's hard to be effective when you're biting your tongue and swallowing your pride at the same time. Romney has dumbed himself down to fit a Republican Party that has become anachronistic, hateful and foolish. He has never once stood up to the party's extremist base in this campaign--not even when asked whether he would accept a deficit deal with $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in new revenues, not even on immigration and contraception, issues that sent women and Latinos scurrying toward the exits. His has been a shameful, shameless campaign. The public will occasionally turn out an incumbent President, but only when offered a real alternative. Mitt Romney has offered them only a mirage.
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
painful day isn't it The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows Mitt Romney attracting support from 47% of voters nationwide, while President Obama earns 46% of the vote. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided.
#2. To: calcon (#1)
Not really. Rasmussen: Florida: Obama 48%, Romney 46% President Obama has now moved slightly ahead in the critical battleground state of Florida despite the presence of the Republican National Convention in Tampa late last month.
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