As for the dreaded individual mandate, Romney explained it the same way he did back when he was governor—as an attempt to make people take more personal responsibility for their medical expenses. “We told people either pay for your insurance or we're going to charge you for the fact that the state will have to pay for your care,” Romney said. How good was Romney at this defense? So good that, quite honestly, I think he sold the mandate better than President Obama ever did.

FOR my money, the most interesting thing about Mitt Romney's health-care speech last week wasn't his struggle to defend Romneycare and distance it from Obamacare, but the largely hostile reception of the speech from the right. In order to understand the agitation Mr Romney's speech caused conservative opinion-makers, one need only read Jonathan Cohn , the liberal New Republic's resident health-care wonk, on Mr Romney's defence of the individual mandate:

Better than President Obama ever did! I think Mr Cohn is honest indeed, but I suspect his candid generosity about Mr Romney's health-care policy acumen and dialectical ability flows in no small part from the glad recognition that Mr Romney's fidelity to Masscare leaves him in hot water with conservatives who have gone all-in against Obamacare. And isn't this why Mr Romney has the conservative commentariat nonplussed? Mr Romney is infamous for his opportunistic waffling on policy, but in his principled refusal to flip-flop on Masscare he has become an intolerable living embodiment of the institutional right's incoherence on health-care reform. Mr Romney's very presence on the national scene reminds conservative editorialists of the fact that Obamacare, a policy they have demonised as incipient tyrannical socialism, differs little from policies many prominent conservatives once endorsed. The cognitive dissonance is too great to bear. So conservative opinionmakers are left with a choice: admit that individual mandates and many other features of Obamacare figured prominently in conservative health-care reform proposals just a few years ago, or throw Mr Romney to the wolves for the crime of leadership in health-care reform. By juxtaposing National Review's editorial on Mr Romney's recent health-care speech with its 2007 editorial endorsing him for the GOP nomination for president, Matthew Yglesias perfectly captures how the right is making Mr Romney pay for its own en masse opportunistic waffling. Here's National Review on Friday:

[W]hen conservatives argue that Obamacare is a threat to the economy, to the quality of health care, and to the proper balance between government and citizenry, we do not mean that it should be implemented at the state level. We mean that it should not be implemented at all. And Romney's health-care federalism is wobbly. The federal government picked up a fifth of the cost of his health-care plan. His justification for the individual mandate also lends itself naturally toward federal imposition of a mandate. He says that the state had to make insurance compulsory to prevent cost shifting, because federal law requires hospitals to treat all comers, insured or not. But if federal law is the source of a national problem, it makes no sense to advocate a state-by-state solution.

"What's strange about this editorial", Mr Yglesias observes, "is that it involves NR pretending that somehow it's Romney who's changed since they endorsed him four years ago rather than conceding that they've simply changed their standards of what counts as conservative health policy."

Here's National Review's 2007 Romney endorsement:

Our guiding principle has always been to select the most conservative viable candidate. In our judgment, that candidate is Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. Unlike some other candidates in the race, Romney is a full-spectrum conservative: a supporter of free-market economics and limited government, moral causes such as the right to life and the preservation of marriage, and a foreign policy based on the national interest. [...] Like any Republican, he would have an uphill climb next fall. But he would be able to offer a persuasive outsider's critique of Washington. His conservative accomplishments as governor showed that he can work with, and resist, a Demo­crat­ic legislature. He knows that not every feature of the health-care plan he enacted in Massachusetts should be replicated nationally, but he can also speak with more authority than any of the other Republican candidates about this pressing issue. He would also have credibility on the economy, given his success as a businessman and a manager of the Olympics. [Emphasis added.]

It remains the case that Mr Romney can speak with more authority than any of the other Republican candidates on this pressing issue. If Mr Cohn is right, he may even be able to speak with more authority on this issue than Barack Obama. Of course, this doesn't mean conservatives will acknowledge this hard-won authority or that Mr Romney won't get battered in the primaries for the fact that the conservative response to Obamacare happened to circle the square of Mr Romney's signal achievement as governor. He may be doomed. Clive Crook thinks so:

I cannot see how Romney gets past this issue. It's a shame. He is in many ways a capable and attractive candidate. And he is far more popular with the Republican electorate than you would expect, given that he is, in effect, an old-fashioned moderate. On health care, you could call him a conservative Democrat. US politics could do with more like him. It is tribute to his charm and tenacity that the GOP, intent on purging all RINOs, has not definitively spat him out already.

I'd be inclined to agree that Mr Romney cannot get past this issue were it clearer that rank-and-file Republican primary-goers suffer the same cognitive dissonance as the National Review's editorial board. It's true, as Mr Crook says, that he is more popular with Republican voters than one might expect. The competent lucidity and managerial intelligence Mr Cohn praises in Mr Romney's discussion of health-care reform remains his principal attraction as a candidate, and it is a powerful one. Mr Romney may have failed last week to satisfy wonkish politics junkies, but his federalist case for state experimentation in health-care policy sounds both sensible and conservative—at least if one doesn't push on it too hard, and most voters won't. Perhaps most importantly, when he talks about this issue, he comes off as an impressively capable man. It seems too early to say for certain that it's beyond Mr Romney's considerable powers to bluster his way past this issue and sell Republican voters on the idea that he's the electable turnaround artist America needs. Conservatives who wish to continue pretending Obamacare does not significantly resemble conservative health-care proposals circa 2006 may want Mr Romney to disappear, and that certainly doesn't help his cause, but it's not enough to make me write him off.

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