“Well, I’m not getting rid of all of health-care reform,” Mitt Romney told David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” “Of course, there are a number of things that I like in health-care reform that I’m going to put in place. One is to make sure that those with preëxisting conditions can get coverage. Two is to assure that the marketplace allows for individuals to have policies that cover their— their family up to whatever age they might like.”

Was this an abandonment of Romney’s across-the-board rejection of Obamacare? Was it an attempt to reclaim Romneycare? (“And you know, even in Massachusetts where I was governor, our plan there deals with preëxisting conditions and with young people,” Romney told Gregory.) Without the rest of Obamacare, how would the preëxisting provision be paid for? And was this, as the Times speculated, “a different tenor … bipartisanship, of sorts.”

None of those possibilities turned out to be the case. Romney’s campaign quickly came in to say that he did not mean what he said. The National Review’s Katrina Trinko got two statements from the Romney campaign. The first was:

In a competitive environment, the marketplace will make available plans that include coverage for what there is demand for. He was not proposing a federal mandate to require insurance plans to offer those particular features.

In other words, if you have enough money, you will be able to buy insurance even with a preëxisting condition, because at the right price someone will sell it. There are two problems here: the prices are all wrong; and this is not what anyone listening to Romney would think he meant when he’d said he’d keep that feature—a federal mandate—in Obamacare. But then a Romney aide told Trinko that what Romney really meant was that he would “ensure that discrimination against individuals with preëxisting conditions who maintain continuous coverage is prohibited,” and pointed her to something he said about people not being “dropped” from their insurance. But that is not what Romney said either—“maintain” coverage is different from “get coverage.” As Ezra Klein notes, there are about eighty-nine million Americans for whom this does nothing. (And the only ones Romney says he’d help already have some protections.)

Was Romney trying to be deceptive—to tell people not to be worried when they should be—or was he just confused? (And which is worse?) Gregory had asked him if he was prepared to tell people with preëxisting conditions that they would lose something in a repeal of Obamacare. Perhaps Romney thought that it would be rude, or unpleasant, to tell people directly that he was going to hurt them—and kinder to act like it would all be fine. That might be in character, though someone has to tell Romney that promising people that they will still have coverage when they won’t is not as acceptable as telling someone she looks nice in a dress when she doesn’t.

That would assume that Romney really understood what he has promised. He may not. At a certain point in his political development, all of these policies and positions may simply have become words to be shuffled around. One wonders if he even understands what it means, in someone’s life, to have a preëxisting condition. He ought to. The meaninglessness of policies to Romney might explain his puzzling comment about how Bill Clinton “elevated” the Democratic convention. Did Romney find it elevating when Bill Clinton said that Romney’s policies were “going to really hurt a lot of poor kids” and “a lot of middle-class families whose kids have Down’s syndrome or autism or other severe conditions,” adding, “If that happens, I don’t know what those families are going to do”? Or perhaps he found the line about Paul Ryan’s “brass” more elevating, or just thought that Clinton was hilarious. (Gregory also asked about Clint Eastwood: “Oh, I was laughing at Clint Eastwood. Look—look, to have him get up and speak in my behalf was a—was a great thrill.”)

The exchange on preëxisting conditions came after the first half of the interview, with Romney’s wife, Ann, on the campaign bus, in which she was asked about empathy. “But I want people to believe in their hearts that we know what it is like to struggle,” Ann said. “And our struggles have not been financial, but they’ve been with health and with difficulties in—in different things in life.” Multiple sclerosis “has been my teacher,” she said, helping her to “be more compassionate and caring for others that are suffering…. And for people to think that we don’t have empathy just because we’re not suffering like they’re suffering is— is ridiculous.”

The stories of Ann’s fight with M.S. and of what a good husband Mitt was, and of his care for fellow Mormon congregants who were sick, are all moving. But they are not political stories, and Ann doesn’t even talk about them that way. There are struggles about health, and struggles about money, but what the Romneys seem to miss is the interconnection of the financial and the medical, even as, for most Americans, those have become inseparable. For Obama, the story about how his mother spent the last months of her life fighting not just cancer but her insurance company leads to a particular policy place. For the Romneys, the only preëxisting condition that really matters is a person’s character. Examples of sympathy and charity are offered, as Ann put it, to defend the honor of “Mitt, who really has been demonized in many ways as being heartless.” Should Mitt, instead, be elevated?

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Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.