Faced with an apparent weakness on health care in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, Mitt Romney’s campaign is turning to an old standby: the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” strategy.
With criticism over its post-Supreme Court messaging mounting, the Romney campaign rolled out its “I know you are but what am I?” tactic Thursday morning — attempting to project its biggest weakness onto Obama. Team Romney has tried this with women voters, Hispanic voters and even the charge that Romney is a flip-flopper.
Now Romney is suggesting it’s Obama who can’t wrangle a coherent message on health care.
“In a curious development, President Obama apparently disagrees with the Supreme Court ruling upholding his health care law,” Romney spokesperson Amanda Henneberg said in a statement Thursday. Henneberg was attacking a statement Obama campaign spokesman Ben Labolt made on CNN that the president believed the mandate provision was a “penalty,” not a tax. “It’s too bad he doesn’t also see that Obamacare is bad policy and bad law. On day one of his presidency, Mitt Romney will begin the process of repealing and replacing Obamacare.”
Over the past couple days, Romney and his campaign have struggled to cope with the court ruling on the health are law, which Republicans are actively trying to recast as the biggest tax increase in history, based on the decision’s classification of the individual mandate as a tax. Romney, who signed a virtually identical individual mandate-based universal coverage system into law as governor of Massachusetts, contradicted one of his campaign’s top advisers Tuesday when he told CBS that the mandate Obama signed is in fact a tax, while the state-level one he signed is not.
The day before, Romney strategist Eric Ferhnstrom told MSNBC that the national mandate was not a tax, and said Romney agrees with Obama’s characterization of the mandate, namely that it’s a “penalty” that only affects Americans who refuse to buy health care coverage despite programs put in place to make it more affordable and accessible.”
Republicans are scratching their heads at Romney’s inability to present a united front with other national Republicans, a hiccup that has reopened the candidate to claims he wants to have it both ways.
In short, the optics so far have not been great, giving Romney’s GOP critics from the primaries — who warned that Romney would have unique difficulties attacking Obama on his health care law — a chance to say I told you so. “[Rick] Santorum must sound like Nostradamus right now,” former Santorum adviser Hogan Gidley told ABC News this week. ABC said the remark was “tongue-in-cheek.”
In a separate TV appearance Thursday, Obama campaign spokesperson Stephanie Cutter said the president hasn’t shifted on the tax vs. penalty argument — and pointed to the Romney campaign’s shifting messaging as evidence that the Republican is the one with the problem.
“This debate is about two presidential candidates: a president who is standing by his position, consistent on his position, pretty clear on his position,” she said, “and a Republican candidate who’s taken both sides of it just in the last week.”
