Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s ad attacking Romneycare, which Charlie linked to earlier, is a good opening salvo in an effort to go after Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts heath care plan, but it will only be effective as part of a sustained campaign.
For reasons unknown to me, over the course of this campaign, Romney’s GOP rivals have not been able to keep up an offensive against his main vulnerability. Now that Perry has run the first ad against the plan, the question is whether he’ll be able to follow through, especially in upcoming debates, the first of which is tomorrow night. If Perry is asked about his Romneycare ad, will he fumble the attack like he did in the last debate? Or will he be able to deliver it fluidly?
At some point Perry will have to be able to articulate why the programs are so similar: both mandate that everybody purchase insurance or pay a fine, expand Medicaid, and provide government subsidies to individuals to purchase government-designed health insurance at a government-run store.
Perry will also have to counter Romney’s federalism dodge. In the attack ad, it does feature clips of Romney back when he said Romneycare should be a national model, of course Romney would point to other examples when he said the opposide (one advantage of being a flip flopper, I suppose). But the important point to make is that just because individual states can pursue certain policies, it doesn’t mean that they should. As a conservative, you wouldn’t want a governor to raise taxes, increase spending or issue a mountain of new regulations, even if he could. And if that governor ran for president saying more taxes, spending and regulation were good for his state, but he vigorously opposes them at the federal level, he’d be laughed off the stage. Perry needs to be able to make the point that the same should be the case for Romney given his untenable position on health care.
