Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took some hard hits in Tuesday’s night’s Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas. He took a harder hit yesterday on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Noting the criticisms during the debate of Romney’s Massachusetts health care reform by former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the common approaches of Romneycare and Obamacare to health care affordability, the Journal observed:
“The trouble with the Obama-Romney definition of ‘affordable’ is that in practice it means subsidies, and once the government provides ‘free’ health care, the private sector and entitlement state are fungible.
“Government inevitably dictates choices that used to be left to markets, as Mr. Santorum and Newt Gingrich pointed out. And, sure enough, due to the subsidy gusher that Mr. Romney opened, Massachusetts is now moving to impose price controls on private insurance and tightly regulate the type of care patients can receive.”
Put otherwise, when Big Government supplants the free market, bureaucrats and politicians set prices, which inevitably leads to shortages, less service for consumers and higher costs.
Despite conducting a masterful campaign and consistently appearing “the most presidential,” Romney has been unable to move his support among GOP voters above the 25 percent or so mark in large part due to continuing doubts about his devotion to limited government. Nothing aggravates those doubts more than his failed defense of Romneycare.
It is an issue that will not go away and, as the Journal noted, must be fully addressed before the GOP picks its nominee to challenge President Obama’s re-election campaign:
“Mr. Obama’s unbridled expansion of government means that the election will present the electorate with the largest philosophical choice since 1980: To continue the trend toward a larger and growing government and the ever-higher taxes to pay for it, or to modernize the 20th century’s broken government institutions.
“Republicans do not want to wake up in 2012 to discover that they have nominated someone who is unprepared, and maybe unwilling, to lead the reform of government that America needs.”
The same day the Journal editorial appeared, long-time conservative fundraiser and strategist Richard Viguerie posed a question in an op-ed in Politico that has frustrated conservatives since President Reagan left office:
Why does Big Government keep growing even when Republicans control the White House and Congress, as they did under President George W. Bush?
Most recently, this frustration sparked the Tea Party, thanks to “alarm over the nationalization of health care and what they saw as our country’s arrival at a political and cultural tipping point.”
The challenge for Romney and Establishment Republicans is that worries about Romneycare fester most intensely at the intersection of the constant growth of government spending and power, and public dissatisfaction most vividly illustrated in the 49 percent found by the Gallup Poll who now view Washington as a threat to their individual freedom.
As Viguerie notes, “Americans are fed up with the political establishment and how it abuses and misuses the law, legal systems and public policy to benefit and enrich its members and its cronies.”
While the mainstream media tries to sell dubious Americans myths about the Occupy Wall Street movement, the demands for change that cannot be ignored by either party come from the Tea Party attitudes that elected the House GOP majority in 2010 and that the party must recapture in 2012.
In short, Romney must convince conservatives that his election would not simply replace Obamacare with a new version of Romneycare and more Big Government.
It’s the political equivalent of squaring the circle, and it means Romney must come to terms with what Viguerie calls “the gut-level revolutionary dissatisfaction with the inside-the-Beltway establishment” represented by the Tea Party.
To do that, Romney can’t just talk about restoring the Constitution and limited government, he must somehow prove he means it.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner.
