The media is finally catching up to the underlying story behind Rick Santorum’s newest evidence that Romneycare is Obamacare.
Santorum’s camp found their evidence not buried in some backwoods Massachusetts publication but in two of the biggest forums in journalism – USA Today and Meet the Press.
How in the world did it take an initial field of nine candidates, in a race that has now lasted about nine months, this long to find this information? The incompetence at play here is almost breathtaking.
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| 2006 Mass. health care bill signing/Getty Images |
Opposition research is one of the basic tenets of a successful campaign at the national level. And the Obama team is clearly much better at it than any of the Republican challengers.
Mitt Romney wrote an entire Op-Ed piece in USA Today in 2009 that urged the nation to adopt his state’s health care reform system. He said something similar on Meet The Press that same year.
That’s a far cry from his claim, repeated at every stop on the campaign trail, that the Massachusetts plan was never intended to serve as anything more than a one-state solution. And, yes, Romney still insists that he would immediately repeal Obamacare, if elected.
In other words, a flip-flop on a major scale.
Beyond the very belated discovery by the Santorum campaign, I distinctly remember seeing an old Romney quote months ago in which he boasted about the Massachusetts plan serving as a national model. I can’t seem to find it at the moment, but it further serves as evidence that this GOP field was and is a bunch of back-benchers.
In fact, Mark Halperin, certainly one of the nation’s top reporters at the presidential level, said today that he wonders if the 2009 info on Romney was leaked, in a roundabout way, by the Obama campaign. That way, they could damage Romney and prolong the increasingly nasty GOP contest while, at the same time, sending a little message to the Republican Party that there’s a lot more to come when the general election rolls around.
