On Romney campaign conference call Gingrich alleges conspiracy to bring back welfare dependence.

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.

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

Conservatives freak as Romney campaign touts Massachusetts health care law Mitt’s promised not to implement.

Rush bashes Mitt for coming out of mandate closet with embrace of RomneyCare.

Just look.

An appropriate day for TPM’s PollTracker Editor Kyle Leighton to get into the Crosstabs of Mitt Romney’s favorability.

So if I’m understanding this right, the Romney campaign’s new campaign theme is Bill Clinton is awesome. So vote Romney.

TPM Reader EW thinks so …

Watching the Romney healthcare fiasco unfold today reminded me of the moment in August ’04 when John Kerry said that if he’d known no WMDs would be found in Iraq, he’d still have voted for war. For Kerry volunteers on the ground like me, that was a total kick in the gut. We’d been working for this guy for months, were motivated more by a dislike of the opponent than a love of the candidate, and then suddenly he steps all over the primary rallying point for his base.

I remembered it being somewhere around this time in August, so I looked it up. August 9th, 2004.

It may seem like Romney press secretary Andrea Saul today went dramatically off-message. Or perhaps it looked like the campaign itself did a sudden about face. But look a little closer and Romney’s been sidling back up to the notion that he’s a health care reform pioneer for a while now, trying to reclaim some advantage for his bringing universal care to Massachusetts.

Saul’s comments today finally took it far enough for everyone to take notice. Check out the full piece here.