Presidential candidate Mitt Romney did an interview with Brett Baier on the Tuesday edition of Fox News’ Special Report. It did not go well.
The really rocky patch came when Baier asked about RomneyCare, and Romney erupted in an incredibly uncomfortable burst of laughter, making a very unsuccessful attempt to dismiss the entire question as patently absurd. Surely you jest, Brett! How many more times must Romney explain that he is as constant as the northern star?
One reason Romney hasn’t been able to break 25% in the polls is that many Republican voters are afraid this is what he’ll do when he faces the incumbent President in the general election, and Obama thanks him for providing the introductory notes in the grand symphony of ObamaCare.
Like any other politician with a history of… flexible positions, Romney often maintains that he has considered the evidence and changed his mind. That’s well and good, but it’s important for someone in that position to display a thorough mastery of his previous mistakes, and bring inquisitive voters along on the intellectual journey that led to his new position. Saying “RomneyCare was awesome for Massachusetts but totally wrong for the nation” is far less effective than diagnosing the failures of RomneyCare, and reintroducing himself as a reborn crusader for health-care freedom, would have been.
And then you get moments like this, where the Jedi Mind Trick is deployed to insist that all those flip-flops have been nothing but puffs of summer breeze in the windmills of our minds. That would be difficult to pull off if Romney was a Democrat, backed up by a media that wanted him to win. The odds of persuading the hostile forces of a pro-Obama mainstream press that he isn’t carrying the RomneyCare droids they’re looking for in his campaign landspeeder are negligible.
