Romney said he doesn't believe he should be the one to stop the booing at debates. Romney won't stop debate boos

Mitt Romney said that though he disagrees with some of the audience booing that’s happened at Republican debates — including of a gay soldier two weeks ago in Orlando — he doesn’t believe he should be the one to stop it.

“I think we can hear the boos,” Romney told the Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., on Monday, in an a 70-minute interview broadcast on C-SPAN. “I would tell you that in these debates there has been a lot of booing and a lot of applause. Cheering and booing. Some of which I don’t agree with. Now I have not made it my practice to scold the audience and say, ‘I disagree with this person, I agree with that person,’ because it goes in a lot of different directions. I don’t recall with this soldier whether people were booing his question or just booing him.”


Informed that the soldier was booed when he identified himself as gay, Romney said he wasn’t sure.

“You’d have to look at it,” he said. “I don’t know when they booed and I don’t know why people booed. I will tell you that the boos and the applause has not always coincided with my own views. But I haven’t stepped in to try and say, ‘This one’s right, this one’s wrong.’ Instead I try to focus on the things I want to say.”

He added: “There were people who cheered when the statement was made at the Reagan Library that a number of some odd number of people have been executed in Texas. I don’t know that cheering for executions is something I would agree with either, but I don’t raise my hand and say, ‘Please let me talk, I want to tell everyone you shouldn’t be cheering that.’ We, I, haven’t made it my practice to listen to the cheers and the boos and try to correct the people on their expressions of their views.”

Romney was questioned at length about the health care plan he enacted in Massachusetts. He again tried to frame his effort as a conservative one, arguing that requiring people purchase insurance saved the vast majority of insured taxpayers from having to underwrite the medical coverage of the uninsured.

“The idea of an individual mandate, or individual responsibility for those people who can afford insurance, did not originate with me,” he said. “It was a conservative idea in the 1990s. Newt Gingrich and others promoted it. The Heritage Foundation helped us craft our plan in Massachusetts and I attest that it’s quite different from what the president did.”

Romney also sought to walk back some of his praise of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, whom he lauded during a Miami town hall meeting last month. At the time, Rick Perry’s campaign attacked Romney for siding with the Obama administration education policy.

“Some of what Arne Duncan is doing, I disagree with,” Romney said Monday. “He’s also trying to promote in his Race To The Top program a nationwide curruiculum. I think that’s a mistake. I oppose a nationwide curriculum. I think the states should craft their own curriciula. When and if he does things I agree with, I’ll point that out.”

And Romney said it was appropriate for President Barack Obama to order the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born man believed to be the operational chief of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who died in a drone strike Friday. Rep. Ron Paul, a Romney competitor for the GOP presidential nomination, on Monday suggested Obama could be impeached for the killing, which he called a movement toward “tyranny.”

“When someone is engaged in treasonous behavior and has aligned themselves with a force that has declared war on the United States of America and is in that sense an enemy combantant, then we have every right to fire upon them as they would fire upon us, and have fired upon us,” Romney said.