Last Call

Mark my words, Mitt Romney will never survive the GOP primaries with his MassCare record.  How toxic is the guy to the Tea Party right?  This toxic.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) takes Dave Weigel for a spin in South Carolina. In 2007 DeMint endorsed Mitt Romney for President -- indeed, served as his campaign co-chair -- but reportedly won't do so again unless Romney disavows his Massachusetts universal health care law, which served as a model for ObamaCare. Reflecting on his past support, DeMint now suggests he was duped.

"I got involved with him before that," DeMint said, "and the concept that was presented to me was the idea of moving people from government plans to private plans. That's what the goal was. That's how my conversations went, and that's how it was presented. But the way it ended up.... I cannot accept all the mandates, all the government exchanges. And it hasn't worked."

Flashback to January 2007. RomneyCare is such a well known achievement that Romney wins DeMint's endorsement because of the law's success.

"[Romney] has demonstrated, when he stepped into government in a very difficult state, that he could work in a difficult partisan environment, take some good conservative ideas, like private health insurance, and apply them to the need to have everyone insured," DeMint said. "Those kind of ideas show an ability to bring people together that we haven't seen in national politics for a while. We don't need the nation to be more polarized."

Then in February of that year DeMint explained on Fox News that Romney should do for America what he had done for Massachusetts with health care: "Well, that's something that I think we should do for the whole country." 

You know, even Tea Party hero Jim DeMint thought MassCare was a great idea...and that it should be made national.  A whole lot of Republicans did.  But since Obama was the one to do it, Republicans have been spending the last two years railing against their own ideas, all because they hate Barack Obama.

That's really the core of it.  If George W. Bush had passed the exact same provisions in the PPACA, Republicans would be praising it across the country.  Because back when George W. Bush was President, that's exactly what Republicans were saying about the ideas that became law in 2010 under Obama.

It would be pathetic if it wasn't such a blood-boiler.