First we have an ad by Priorities USA Action featuring a steelworker from Indiana who was (allegedly) laid off from a factory owned by Romney-founded Bain Capital, blaming his wife’s death — caused by cancer — to his family losing health insurance after he was laid off and, consequently, on the presumptive GOP nominee.
I have seen the ad and have mixed feelings about its accuracy and its appropriateness. But then, in a stunning gaffe or in a rare moment of honesty, Andrea Saul, Romney’s campaign press secretary, offered what probably was supposed to be a rebuttal or counterattack but turned out to be an admission of how well Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan — one from which Romney is desperately trying to distance himself — would have helped the steelworker’s wife: “To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care.”
Perhaps as an afterthought, or in remorse, she added: “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President Obama’s economy.”
Well, that should make everything OK for the Romney campaign, or is it a sign of more confusion and controversy to come on this issue?
The health care law Romney helped to craft and signed in 2006 is often described as a forerunner to Obama’s own health care overhaul, which passed Congress four years later without a single Republican vote.
Romney has said his law worked for Massachusetts but wouldn’t necessarily work in other states. He has pledged to grant every state a waiver from Obama’s law on his first day in office and said he would work to repeal the legislation in its entirety.
