DOA

Is This the End of Mitt Romney?

The Republican origins of health-care reform.

It is conceivable that President Obama will be able to kill off one of his biggest 2012 rivals with a single sentence: “I would like to thank Mitt Romney for coming up with ideas on which I based health-care reform.” Indeed, although Romney was frothing at the mouth on Sunday—he practically accused Obama of treason—he implemented the basic tenets of “ObamaCare” in Massachusetts in 2004. That is, he restructured insurance markets “to remove those adverse-selection and moral-hazard problems that have broken our private insurance-based health-financing system,” as Brad DeLong puts it in The Week. At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall writes, “If the Republicans want to make Obama's signature piece of legislation a centerpiece of their 2012 campaign (and it's hard to imagine they won't since what else will they run on?), they can't very well run a candidate who supported and passed close to an identical bill… [C]an anyone explain to me why this doesn't fatally hobble any GOP presidential campaign in 2012? And because of that make Romney close to impossible to nominate?”