Video: Republican Mitt Romney campaigned in Des Moines, Iowa Wednesday. Making an appeal to middle class voters in a swing state crucial to the presidential election.
Mitt Romney drew new fire from his conservative allies on a familiar topic Wednesday — health-care reform — as his spokeswoman offered unusual praise for his efforts on the issue as Massachusetts governor.
In an interview with Fox News Channel on Wednesday, Andrea Saul invoked Massachusetts’s expansion of health coverage as a defense to a harsh new ad funded by a super PAC supporting President Obama. In the spot, a former steelworker whose plant was closed by Bain Capital blames Romney, who co-founded the firm, for his family’s loss of health insurance and his wife’s subsequent death from cancer.
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“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health-care plan, they would have had health care,” Saul said in the interview. “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President Obama’s economy.”
The comments were unusual for a campaign that has typically steered clear of the 2006 Massachusetts overhaul, sensitive to conservatives’ concerns that the program too closely mimics the Democratic health-care law they are determined to undo.
At an event in Iowa on Wednesday, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee offered his Massachusetts experience to show that he is an expert on health-care reform.
“We’ve got to do some reforms in health care, and I have some experience doing that, as you know,” he told a crowd, after receiving a standing ovation for repeating his promise to repeal Obama’s law.
Romney has always maintained that although his reform efforts worked for Massachusetts, the federal government should not force a similar solution on the nation.
He has said that on his first day as president, he would sign an executive order offering states a waiver to opt out of the law and would sign any repeal legislation passed by Congress.
Although he has never disavowed the Massachusetts effort, he has often appeared hesitant to discuss the program, which drew harsh criticism from his Republican rivals during the presidential primaries. The Massachusetts and federal programs both include a core requirement that participants buy medical insurance or pay a fee.
Early in the primary contest, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty chided that the two programs were so similar, they could be called “Obamneycare.” Former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) once said that Romney’s efforts in Massachusetts made him the worst possible Republican to face Obama.
Along those lines, the twin moments of praise Wednesday for the Massachusetts program elicited immediate howls of protest from conservatives. After all, they said, if Romney believes that expanding health coverage through a government program was a positive development for Massachusetts residents, couldn’t Democrats argue that other Americans should receive similar protections?
“Andrea Saul’s appearance on Fox was a potential gold mine for Obama supporters,” conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday. “They can say, ‘Romneycare was the basis for our health care.’ ”
It was his father - the better man - who believed in transparency.
