By Robert Field
The following article appeared in Politic: “Without Romneycare, no Obamacare.”
“In a Boston Globe obituary for Staples founder Thomas Stemberg, who died Friday at the age of 66, [Mitt] Romney attributed his focus on health care as governor to a conversation the two had shortly after his election. According to the Globe, the late businessman asked Romney why he ran for governor, to which he replied that he wanted to help people. In turn, Stemberg told Romney that the most effective way to accomplish his goals in that regard would be to ensure health-care access for everyone….
“ ‘Without Tom pushing it, I don’t think we would have had Romneycare,’ said Romney, who helped Stemberg open the first Staples store in the 1980s with the backing of Bain Capital. ‘Without Romneycare, I don’t think we would have Obamacare. So, without Tom a lot of people wouldn’t have health insurance.’
“In public, Romney has always sought to distinguish his work in Massachusetts from the Affordable Care Act, which many health experts say draws upon policy innovations developed while he was governor.
“Romney has long argued that his Massachusetts plan was never meant to be expanded to the national level, and he pledged in 2012 to grant every state a waiver from the law on his first day as president. He’s long advocated the law’s repeal. But his latest comments also mirror a recent suggestion by his wife, Ann, that the health law has been helped people with preexisting conditions get insurance… ”
Romney’s career history suggested that he would be a good moderate Republican President along the lines of George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon (other than Watergate) and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
But because he felt the need to pander to the extreme right wing of his party, and perhaps he did, he turned his back on himself and from his outstanding accomplishment in broadening health care in his state of Massachusettes.
He renounced what he believed and came to espouse much of what he abhorred.
In short, he ‘whored himself.’
Somehow the Republican Party needs to free itself from the sway of the Tea Party just as the Democrats did from the states-rights Dixiecrats a half century ago.
It would be good for the party and it would be good for the country.
And who knows, Mitt Romney may yet be the Republican’s 2016 candidate. They could do much worse.
