Who Cares

Polls have shown Mitt Romney to be the leading Republican candidate for President. All such polls before late 2011 are meaningless, of course. I expect the Republican candidate to be someone we're not even thinking about now.

Still, if Romney does become the Republican candidate, there's an obvious problem: Republicans plan to run against government health care, but Romney's big accomplishment as Massachusetts Governor was to have his state take over health care.

Furthermore, as Peter Suderman at Reason notes, not only will it be difficult for him to differentiate Obamacare and the Mass. Plan, but his Republican opponents will be able to attack Mitt with the failure of what's going on in Mitt's state. As a Wall Street Journal editorial recently put it:

The universal insurance coverage we adopted in 2006 was projected to cost taxpayers $88 million a year. However, since this program was adopted in 2006, our health-care costs have in total exceeded $4 billion. The cost of Massachusetts' plan has blown a hole in the Commonwealth's budget. Just last Thursday, Gov. Deval Patrick's office announced a $294 million shortfall related to health-care costs.

Romney may be an attractive candidate for the general election, but he's got to win over his party first.