AMERICA
Rewriting History: Romney’s Critics Suffering From a Dose
DISPATCHES
THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE is likely to be Mitt Romney, David Keene, president of the National Rifl e Association and former chairman of the American
Conservative Union, tells me.
Given the state of the economy, Romney’s credentials are unmatched, Keene says. “Romney has the best economic credentials of anybody in the Republican Party. So when he says, ‘I can deal with the economy and creating jobs,’ he’s probably more credible than almost any of the other candidates. He’s the only one really with a national infrastructure, a national fundraising base, and a national organization. So he’s done his groundwork over the last four years.”
KESSLER’S WASHINGTON
RONALD
Conservatives’ biggest knock against Romney is that he implemented an individual health insurance mandate in Massachusetts. But if you look at the Republican leaders who have supported the idea over the years, you wonder who is fooling whom.
In the early 1970s, President Richard
Nixon favored such a mandate. In the 1990s, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich supported a mandate. The Heritage Foundation, one of the top conservative think tanks, embraced a mandate.
“Most Republican leaders in that
era supported a mandate, and the Romney plan came out of the Heritage plan,” Keene notes. More recently, when asked on Fox News in February 2007 about the Romney plan, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee and a favorite of the tea party movement, said, “Well, that’s something I think we should do for the whole country.”
In announcing his run for governor of Minnesota, Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty said in May 2006, “We’ll be looking, like we do in automobile insurance, to require people who have the resources and the means to have [health] insurance.”
22 NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011
In November 2006, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that Pawlenty said he was “open to a state law that would try to achieve universal coverage by requiring that all Minnesotans have insurance.”
Asked if a health insurance mandate would be a good idea, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman said in September 2007 to Utah’s KUED public television station, “I’m comfortable with a requirement.” In March 2008, Huntsman, as Utah’s governor, signed into law healthcare reform legislation that included a requirement to study the benefi ts of imposing a mandate. Pawlenty has since said he never supported a mandate; Huntsman says he never
Who’s fooling whom? From Dole to Gingrich to DeMint, many top Republicans who once embraced the individual mandate now want to erase their past words.
PHOTO COMPOSITE: PENCIL/ISTOCKPHOTO / DEMINT, HUNTSMAN, PAWLENTY/AP IMAGES
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