Gingrich gave marvelously detailed answers, reflecting the deep study he has made on American public policy during his years in politics, and demonstrated that he has the best command of both facts and philosophy on stage.
Gingrich was on his game from the beginning when he let loose a ringing anti-Bernake, anti-food stamps, anti-Alinsky answer. … The narrative about his rise will continue.
The big winners in the debate tonight were probably Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. …
Newt Gingrich was cerebral and wide-ranging. When CNBC tried to trip him up, he fired back with specifics that delighted the crowd. His breadth of learning was refreshing and dominating.
Gingrich got off the best line of the night when he faulted the media for not asking the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators if they have a clue how the new economy works. … Gingrich wants to challenge President Obama to a series of Lincoln-Douglas–style debates that would last for three hours and get into great detail about everything that matters. I have no doubt Gingrich would win such a debate.
[Newt's] performance in tonight’s debate was another impressive performance by a man who not only has a wealth of knowledge on all the issues, but he’s smart enough to not to be played by the media.
Newt Gingrich: Once again, the former House Speaker owned the stage. He did not completely dominate, but it is hard to argue that anyone other than Gingrich won the debate. He battled with the moderators again and might have come off as too angry at times. However, on style and substance, Newt delivered. Again.
…
Overall Winner: Newt Gingrich. This is getting redundant. He did not dominate, but Gingrich was the most in command of anyone on the stage.
Newt has hit his stride, and was consistently the most impressive and forceful person on the stage—and forceful without saying a negative word about any of the other candidates.
As usual, [Newt] was dynamite: brilliant, deliberative and right about everything. Now that we all realized that we’re less than a year from the presidential election, we’re trying to visualize the presidential debates. Which of the GOP candidates could thrust and parry with Obama most effectively? All of them would do a great job. Only Newt would truly make mincemeat out of him. That’s the main reason he’s rising in the polls. He’s a serious conservative intellectual who is fearless.
But the winner of the debate was Newt. I mentioned last time that he’s my sleeper pick to challenge Romney, and he did a lot to improve his chances tonight.
Daniel
…what is increasingly clear is that the former House Speaker is the most learned candidate running for president. Drawing on his wealth of knowledge and years of experience in Congress, Gingrich adeptly understands the most trying issues of our time. His ability to answer complex questions, as he did Wednesday night, with specific and innovative solutions is emboldening his candidacy.
Gawker has an interesting headline The Old Mitt Romney Photo That He Probably Wants Destroyed
Time’s Michael Scherer digs up this photo from the Romney media archives showing our man Mittens and his old Bain Capital buddies playing with money.
Look at them, hugging and eating and rubbing and sucking their corporate-raider money. At least Romney had enough sense not to stuff it in his collar like that one guy, instead choosing to simply grab on to the right end of a bill while smiling, devilishly. Oh, and then there’s some money falling out of his coat. Oops!
If this does not appear in an attack ad at some point in the next year, then various rival campaigns will have failed.
An old black and white photo
UPDATE: The first use of this image in media about Romney has been spotted in NY Mag:
Actor and comedian Jay Mohr was on Imus in the Morning and talked about the 2012 presidential campaign and candidates, saying he likes Jon Huntsman “because he’s hot”.
Author S.E. Cupp was also on the show and commented on the 2012 presidential election now that Chris Christie and Sarah Palin have chosen not to run, saying it’s going to be weird for Conservatives to pretend that they actually like Mitt Romney.
Philip Klein, senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner, wrote a piece titled, Romney’s false health care claims echo Obama’s. Klein attacks a few sound bites Mitt Romney gave at the recent Fox/Google debate while trying to explain his 2006 MA health care bill. Unfortunately, Klein ignores the larger context of what Romney is saying, which Romney amply provides in his book, No Apology.
In his effort to make Romneycare and Obamacare seem alike, Klein doesn’t deny the differences between them. Moreover, he doesn’t even mention the differences. Romney didn’t cut Medicare/Medicaid, didn’t impose insurance price controls and didn’t do a host of other things Obama did in his 2,700 page bill. Romney’s bill is only 72 pages.
“It’s a work in progress,” Rubio says, speaking of the Bay State program. “There are major distinctions between that and what Obama is trying to do in Washington. For one, it didn’t raise any taxes. Number two, it is not adding to our deficit. That is my biggest objection to Obamacare, although there are many others. My number-one objection to Obamacare is that we can’t afford it, even if it was the greatest idea in the world.”
“Florida and Massachusetts are very different places,” Rubio continues. “All I would say to you is that states were designed to be laboratories for creative thoughts and ideas. That’s what the Framers of our great republic intended. They wanted the states to be the places that came up with innovation and competition. And I’ll tell you what, if Massachusetts gets it wrong and Florida gets it right, people will move to Florida, and businesses will move to Florida, and vice versa. There are just major distinctions between what’s happening in Washington and what I hope states will do. Like I said, what I’m not in favor of is what Barack Obama has done, which is to raise taxes and add to the federal deficit in exchange of taking a step toward a single-payer system in America.”
Klein cites a number of quotes from President Obama regarding his own health care plan, comparing them to selected statements from Romney, made during the debate. For our purposes, Obama’s statements are not relevant. Whether or not Obama is being truthful about his own plan has no bearing on the truth of Romney’s statements.
Rather than admitting that Romney’s 30 second debate answers are not intended for a hyper-technical audience the way his book is, Klein claims Romney is “consistently making a series of blatant lies.” That is a serious accusation, so let’s look at the first of Romney’s statements which Klein is referring to (from the official debate transcript):
ROMNEY: Let me tell you this about our system in Massachusetts: 92 percent of our people were insured before we put our plan in place. Nothing’s changed for them. The system is the same. They have private market-based insurance.
Admittedly, the second half of Mitt’s statement is not technically accurate unless taken in the context of the first sentence. Romney wasn’t saying their lives haven’t changed in any way at all, but was addressing the primary concern people have expressed to him, which is the mandate to own insurance. Mitt appears to be minimizing that particular concern by explaining that since most people in MA already had insurance, the new law was only telling them to do something they were already doing.
But Klein doesn’t see it that way:
Neither bill literally says that people have to drop their coverage, but both Obamacare … and Romneycare … effectively make people lose their current coverage. For one thing, both mandate that individuals purchase insurance, and once the government does that, it has to define what qualifies as “insurance.” Obamacare employs the phrase “minimum essential coverage,” where as in Romneycare, it’s called “minimum creditable coverage” (see Chapter 111M, section 1). In both cases, anybody who does not have a qualified insurance policy, therefore, has to obtain one that meets the government-imposed standards, or pay a fine.
The first fact to defeat Klein’s argument is that the coverage mandates are on insurance companies, not on policy holders. So his claim that people lost their coverage and had to switch is untrue.
The second problem with Klein’s argument is that he complains about “minimum essential coverage,” however states routinely “define what qualifies as ‘insurance.’” States regulate insurance just like they regulate other companies. Texas, for example, has mandated benefits for insurance coverage, which it applied universally as recently as 2004, at which point the state implemented “consumer choice plans” which do not contain all of the state mandated benefits but must be individually approved by the state. Regulations like “minimum essential coverage” were nothing new for MA. As Romney accurately said, “the system is the same.” Regulatory changes are inherent in that system.
Perhaps Klein is thinking of how the MA legislature expanded regulations further by mandating that “the division shall include within its covered services for adults all federally optional services that were included in its state plan or demonstration program in effect on January 1, 2002.” Romney vetoed this in the bill but the legislature overrode the veto. In his book, Romney explains, “I would reinstitute my vetoes of the legislature’s additions. Among these, one of the most significant is my conviction that the state should not mandate which benefits must be included in health insurance policies: Consumers should be free to choose which benefits they want” (PB, p. 194).
It’s hard to argue that someone supported something they vetoed. But Klein tries anyway, and in the process tips his hand about his lack of objectivity:
In the past, Romney’s tried to tout the fact that he vetoed some of the benefit mandates but was overridden by the legislature. That’s a disingenuous argument, because he spent years crafting the bill, signed it with a smiling Ted Kennedy at his side, touted it publicly, and issued symbolic vetoes knowing that they would be overridden, just to give him some conservative cover. This argument would be the equivalent of a Republican Senator having worked with Democrats for a year to pass Obamacare, voting it out of committee, giving it the 60 vote threshold it needed to break a filibuster, and then voting against final passage and trying to use that final meaningless vote to make a case to primary voters.
Contrary to Klein’s claims, the legislature in MA continued making changes to the bill throughout the entire process. His U.S. Senate analogy fails because Romney always opposed the provisions he vetoed and never did anything comparable to voting them out of a Senate committee. It would be more accurate to say the Senate sent the provisions in the first place knowing Governor Romney would not be able to stop them from overriding his vetoes (although in the case of two of the vetoes, the legislature was not able to garner enough votes to override).
Klein continues his analysis:
“Furthermore, both plans create incentives for businesses to drop employer-based private insurance and dump workers on the government exchanges. We’ve seen rumblings of this as Obamacare moves closer to implementation, and last year the Boston Globe reported the following news: ‘The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget.’
“So, Romney’s claim in last night’s debate is just as dishonest as when Obama made the same claim to the American people two years ago.”
And most importantly, Klein again neglects to crack open Romney’s book:
“When the reform was passed … we required everyone who received subsidized insurance to pay a fair share of their premiums–the new liberal administration decided that some people should get their insurance for nothing. Imagine the additional cost to the state of such a decision.” Romney further noted, “elections have consequences.” (PB, p. 194)
Now let’s look at Klein’s next example in the alleged “series of blatant lies”:
“ROMNEY: We had 8 percent of our people that weren’t insured. And so what we did is we said let’s find a way to get them insurance, again, market-based private insurance. We didn’t come up with some new government insurance plan.”
Indeed, the Massachusetts Connector is not an insurance plan. It just helps people find private insurance companies, and when necessary diverts medicaid funds for that purpose. Ronald Reagan proposed a plan to do something similar, with Medicare:
“The plan expands opportunities for Medicare beneficiaries to use their benefits to enroll in private health plans as an alternative to traditional Medicare coverage”
– Ronald Wilson Reagan, February 28, 1983, transmitting to Congress his Health Insurance Reform program
Now that we’ve heard from Reagan, let’s hear from Klein:
“It’s not clear if by “new government insurance plan,” Romney meant a “public option,” but either way, that’s moot, because the idea wasn’t a part of the final version of the national health care bill that Obama signed, either. Yet what both plans do have in common is a government-run health care exchange, in which individuals use government subsidies to purchase health insurance that meets requirements set by government-appointed officials.”
As we have already discussed, every state government sets requirements for private health insurance. If Klein is claiming that these constitute a “new government insurance plan,” he would have to apply that to the other states as well. Or perhaps he is claiming that medicaid is the “new government insurance plan,” but Romney didn’t create medicaid. It’s been around for a long time.
Now for the last of the alleged “blatant lies” cited by Klein:
“ROMNEY: Our plan in Massachusetts has some good parts, some bad parts, some things I’d change, some things I like about it. It’s different than Obamacare.”
Klein’s claim:
“Romney says there are some ‘bad parts,’ but won’t specify what they are.”
No. Klein just made that up. Klein is making the same mistake as our friends at RedState. And clearly Klein did not feel the need to do any real research before writing his attack. In his book, No Apology (PB), Romney explains some aspects which he once supported but no longer does, and has consistently opposed many aspects which were foisted upon the health care plan against his desires.
If Klein would actually learn more about Romney, he might like him.
Huckabee’s exclusive interview with the GOP presidential frontrunner might also make you want to take this review course: A Brief History of Why Huckabee and Romney Don’t Like Each Other – although I think it’s more accurate to say that Huckabee holds more of the fued. While Romney has defended Huckabee and spoke kindly of him since the 2007 primary campaign, Huckabee continued to do the opposite of Romney:
Long after the campaign ended with niether of the two winning the nomination, Huckabee dredged up old wounds in a November 2008 book. He wrote that he felt “total disrespect” when Romney didn’t call him after he won the Iowa caucuses and characterized Mitt as being “anything but conservative until he changed the light bulbs in his chandelier in time to run for president.” He then panned Romney’s economic shtick by writing why don’t you let voters “eat stocks.”
Generally speaking, our two parties have wanted to nominate candidates who have shown special strength among the voters who know them best. None of the nine candidates who participated in the Fox News/Google debate in Orlando has really done that. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have won elections by margins comparable to those of John Cornyn and Paul Cellucci, competent officeholders but not on anyone’s list of presidential candidates. Ron Paul ran well ahead of his party base in 2010 against weak opposition; Michele Bachmann has not done so in three races against vigorous opponents. Newt Gingrich’s record of running ahead of party is spotty; Herman Cain’s is nonexistent.
Rick Santorum outperformed the Republican base in 1992 and 1994, but woefully underperformed it in 2006. Jon Huntsman and Gary Johnson won solid majorities for reelection against weak opposition.
None of them has performed, at least recently, as Chris Christie did when he was defeated an incumbent governor by a 48%-45% margin in New Jersey in 2009, a year after it had voted 57%-42% for Barack Obama, or Mitch Daniels, who was reelected over a former member of Congress by a 58%-40% margin in Indiana on the same day the state voted 50%-49% for Barack Obama, or Paul Ryan, who has been reelected with between 63% and 68% of the vote between 2000 and 2010 in a district which voted Democratic for president by 49%-47% in 2000, 54%-46% in 2004 and 51%-47% in 2008. These are Republicans who have shown the capacity to overperform the party’s generic base.
Rick Perry came prepared with an attack on Mitt Romney that in Romneys book No Apologies, he claimed that he wanted the Massachusetts healthcare model to be adopted by the rest of the country, yet in the paperback edition this was deleted. While one specific line may have indeed been edited from the paperback, a scan of the original book proves that the context was unchanged and that Romney did not in fact advocate the whole country having MA-care foisted upon them. The book, provided by pro-Romney site WhyRomney.com instead says the opposite of what Perry claimed.
Reposted from WhyRomney, with permission:
Critics cite differences between the paperback and hardcover editions of Romney’s book, “No Apology,” accusing Mitt Romney of subtly changing positions on Obama’s policies to harden his stance for political reasons. However, critics falsely lead people to this conclusion by taking excerpts out of context. For instance, critics claim that Romney called Obama’s stimulus plan “a failure” in the paperback but not in the hardcover. The truth however is that Romney wrote the hardcover during the initial phase of the stimulus and thus could not yet claim that it had “failed,” or elaborate on the effectiveness of details which had not yet been implemented. But Romney specifically said on page 145 of the hardcover that Obama’s stimulus had “already been far less than successful,” and Romney predicted “it will impose a heavy burden on the economy in the intermediate and long term.”
Critics also fail to mention that on page 31 of the hardcover, Romney says “the record and achievement of modern free-market capitalism” is “now at risk because of the economic policies of President Obama.” Romney goes on to say, “His effort to expand the size, reach and role of government is without precedent in our history. His plans would leave us with a crushing deficit and debt, far beyond anything we have ever experienced.” Also on page 31, Romney writes that “at a time when Europe is moving away from socialism and its many failures, President Obama is moving toward that direction.”
Likewise, critcs claim that in the hardcover Romney promoted Obama’s stimulus on pages 144-145 as something that would “accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery.” But in fact, Romney’s statement was alluding to the limited tax cut portion of the stimulus, having put it in that context in the previous line which critics leave out, by statinSupremg that congressional Democrats fail to understand “the crucial role played by tax cuts.” It is in this context that Romney said the stimulus would not help “as much as it could have had it included genuine tax- and job-generating incentives.”
In a similar criticism, critics accuse Romney of being soft on Obamacare in the hardcover because in the paperback he stated that it should be “repealed,” but in the hardcover did not call for a “repeal.” The truth however is that Obamacare had not passed when Romney wrote the hardcover edition and its passing seemed less likely at the time because of the election of MA Senator Scott Brown. With no law to repeal, a call for repeal would have made no sense. Furthermore, Romney had no pressing need to discuss Obama’s health care ideas in extended detail.
In fact, while Romney has a reputation as a flip-flopper (which this ad tries to exploit), he has been consistent in saying he did not want to import his plan to the rest of the country. When the Massachusetts law was passed in 2006, he appeared on MSNBC and was asked whether it would work for the rest of the country.
“Well, it will work for Massachusetts, and that’s of course the thing that I had to focus on,” Romney replied. “There are certain aspects of it that I think would work across the country, perhaps better in some states than others. Of course the great thing about federalism is you let a state try it and see how it works before you spread it out.”
Romney made a similar point in an interview with Dan Balz of The Washington Post in 2007, as he recalled during last week’s debate. “Instead of having the federal government give us one-size-fits-all, everybody-must-follow-the-same-plan, let states develop their own,” he told Balz.
We closely compared the chapter on health care in the two editions so you don’t have to. Essentially, it is clear that the hardcover edition was written when Obama’s health-care plan was still a work in progress. For instance, Romney spends some time denouncing the idea of a public option as “government-supplied insurance.” The paperback was published after the health-care law was passed, so the paragraphs on the public option — which had been abandoned by Obama — are dropped.
The main point: Romney has long said he did not view his plan as a model for the nation, and he has not wavered on that stance.
Livonia Rep. Thaddeus McCotter told The Detroit News this afternoon that he is leaving the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
McCotter says he will give his support to former Massachussetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and will likely run again for the 11th District congressional seat he’s held since 2003.
McCotter began his long-shot bid for the White House in July, billing himself as the voice for a new generation of conservatives. He campaigned on a dramatic reform of Social Security, and a tougher approach to dealings with China.
However, in June McCotter called Romney Obama’s de facto running mate and in fact, the news of the endorsement sits right above the most recent news item about McCotter on FoxNews.com which was this very criticism leveled against the candidate he now champions.
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