Rush bashes Mitt for coming out of mandate closet with embrace of RomneyCare.
Conservatives freak as Romney campaign touts Massachusetts health care law Mitt’s promised not to implement.
It says a lot about the Republican party’s entanglement with the conservative movement that Mitt Romney’s single greatest policy achievement — Romneycare — was supposed to be fully off limits to his campaign. Anything that vindicates Obamacare or reinforces its conservative origins has to be buried.
But the marching orders were so loud and so clear, it was almost taken for granted that Romney wouldn’t go there. That assumption fell apart last night, and now conservatives are writhing in conniptions, wondering if this might be the moment when Boston flushes the campaign down the toilet.
I doubt that. But the breach exposes more than just an uneasy relationship between Romney and the right. Read More
In yet another unforced error, the Romney campaign manages to whip up a storm on the right by saying how awesome RomneyCare really is after all.
On Romney campaign conference call Gingrich alleges conspiracy to bring back welfare dependence.
The TPM Electoral Scoreboard moves to Obama 323, Romney 191, as Colorado moves back to Toss Up from Leans Obama and Virginia moves to Leans Obama from Toss Up.
Readers have been eating up TPM Reader and private equity professional MB’s explanation of how Mitt Romney’s severance agreement might have led to his paying little to no income tax over the last decade. Now he returns with more thoughts on the mystery of Mitt’s taxes and how Reid might have learned some of the secrets … Read More
As we’ve said from the beginning, Harry Reid’s claim of an undisclosed source who says Mitt Romney paid no taxes for ten years was a low blow and an irresponsible claim. Not because it was implausible or even particularly unlikely but simply because you shouldn’t publicly accuse people of things based on totally unsubstantiated and unrevealed evidence. But now conservatives are claiming a double-standard because Reid’s claims aren’t being treated in just the same way as Rep. Michele Bachmann’s smear of Huma Abedin and other American Muslims.
It is difficult to find a better example of the strange mixture of paranoia, bad faith and self-pity that is behind so many conservative claims of media bias. Read More
In this morning’s feature story we explain why Harry Reid is a much badder mofo than you probably thought.