It’s a cliché but fitting: Mitt Romney don’t get no respect. The GOP “front runner” in the race that has no front-runner also gets little love, sparks little enthusiasm and is being seen as a flip-flopping politician by many conservatives, liberals, moderates, once-admiring RINOs and the news media. At least he’s now a consensus builder.
Romney’s problem is that he’s stuck in two time tunnels – the time tunnel of his past and the time tunnel of a different Republican era when he would have been a perfect candidate.
Romney was a solid, East Coast moderate Republican governor. His Massachusetts health care law wasn’t an obstacle when he ran for President in 2008 but with the GOP’s rightward shift – and once sympathetic publications such as the National Review and Wall Street Journal lambasting him — – he keeps trying to find creative ways to distance himself from his signature law.
And so we see two politically conjoined Siamese twin Romneys, bringing to mind this from The Mayo Clinic:” If the [conjoined twins] babies share a heart or brain, for example, separation surgery may not be possible. An emergency separation may be needed if one of the twins dies, develops a life-threatening condition or threatens the survival of the other twin.
Romney is trying to separate one from the other for his political survival. And the prognosis is poor.
We see Romney defending his Massachusetts health plan’s individual mandate and saying how wonderful it is for his state, then denouncing Barack Obama’s plan for doing it on a national level. A true “Profiles in Courage” moment would have been denouncing his past actions and taking the (rightful) heat or totally defending what he did in Massachusetts because it was the effective, smart and correct thing to do there — and nationally.
Romney speech didn’t thread the needle. He knotted his political hanging rope.
One columnist likened it to a dog sprayed by a skunk trying to outrun his own smell. The White House – in a sign they’d rather not run against him – issued pointed kiss of death praise for Romney’s law.
Once upon a time Romney would have been a Republican dream candidate.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.