Republican Mitt Romney intends to use the Supreme Court’s ruling on President Obama’s health care law, expected Thursday, to cast the president’s first term as a complete failure.
Romney will argue that Obama spent much of his first years in office lobbying for the health care law, ignoring the ailing economy and failing to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise to reform the immigration system.
“If Obamacare is not deemed constitutional, then the first three and a half years of this president’s term will have been wasted on something that has not helped the American people,” Romney said, previewing his health care message to a crowd in Salem, Va., on Tuesday. “What we’re witnessing is a failure of the president’s policies.”
Campaigning 430 miles away in Atlanta, Obama vehemently defended the health care law.
“It’s the right thing to do to give seniors discounts on their prescription drugs,” Obama told a crowd of about 500 donors. “It’s the right thing to do to give 30 million Americans health insurance that didn’t have it before.”
Obama never mentioned the pending court decision, even as he warned that Romney, as president, would roll back some of the law’s most popular provisions, including requiring insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions.
“He’d roll back the Affordable Care Act, and he’d block-grant Medicaid in such a way where vulnerable people all across the country, folks who may be disabled, seniors who are relying on those services — that would be eliminated,” Obama said. “It ain’t right.”
Romney was testing a message he’d use if the court struck down Obama’s reforms, but the presumptive Republican nominee could benefit even if the court upholds the law. A ruling in favor of Obama could energize Republican voters now feeling tepid toward Romney. Repealing those two-year-old reforms has become a campaign battle cry for Republicans.
“If it is deemed to stand, then I’ll tell you one thing,” Romney said, “We’re going to have to have a president, and I’m that one, that’s going to get rid of Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it on day one.”
Romney is making another campaign stop in Virginia on Wednesday at EIT LLC, an electronic design company in Sterling.
Obama welcomed Romney to the state by airing a new ad that calls the former Massachusetts governor an “outsourcer-in-chief” of American jobs. The ad highlights a report that Bain Capital, the private equity company that Romney co-founded, invested in firms that specialized in relocating American jobs overseas.
Romney says the report misrepresents Bain’s activities. He says Obama is trying to shift attention away from his “failed” record.
“[Obama] failed to do what he said he would do,” Romney said. “Instead of focusing on immigration and of course on the big issue, which was the economy and getting the economy going, he instead focused on putting in place his health care reform.”
