On ABC's This Week, George Will tried to hit two birds with one stone. And while ricocheting off the first, when attempting to simplify the Cain factor by pointing out only one facet of his rise (anti-Romney), Will astoundingly hit the target with precision accuracy when describing Mitt Romney:
"It has a lot to do with Romney. He is rising as more and more Republicans come to the conclusion that the Republican Party has found its Michael Dukakis -- a technocratic Massachusetts governor running on competence, not ideology."
Minus the fact that Dukakis was actually an ideological statist, as Rush accurately pointed out on Monday's program, Will has the man pegged. To insinuate that the Republican Establishment is just as satisfied with Romney as the Democrat Establishment was with Dukakis is telling indeed. Here, in this description, whether Will meant to or not, successfully denotes that Romney is NOT a conservative at all, but a Republican moderate, a technocrat, another statist enabler.
And the latest scoop on Romney and his signature legislation as Massachusetts governor only serves to further reinforce such a description. The Los Angeles Times dropped a bombshell of a story with a report on RomneyCare and taxpayer-subsidized care for illegal immigrants!
The Massachusetts healthcare law that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed in 2006 includes a program known as the Health Safety Net, which allows undocumented immigrants to get needed medical care along with others who lack insurance.
Uninsured, poor immigrants can walk into a health clinic or hospital in the state and get publicly subsidized care at virtually no cost to them, regardless of their immigration status.
The program, widely supported in Massachusetts, drew little attention when Romney signed the trailblazing healthcare law. But now it could prove problematic for the Republican presidential hopeful, who has been attacking Texas Gov. Rick Perry for supporting educational aid for children of undocumented immigrants in Texas.
Of course, Romney will charm you into believing this is no big deal. And as you read further into the story, the L.A. Times seems to do the same, with its acceptance of both Romney and Perry providing services to illegals, insinuating that it'd cost more not to, when studies show that exorbitant amounts of taxpayer-subsidized funding for illegals is exceeding billions in both education and healthcare.
As Ed Morrissey explains in HotAir piece, "This will almost certainly sting Romney in the political battles of the primary and offer Perry a rebuttal point in the debates. After all, he made a similar point about the economic benefit of ensuring that students get educations to stay off of welfare rolls and end up as net contributors rather than net recipients to society. Romney’s argument is more directly tied to the economics of health care than Perry’s is on education, but that’s a nuance that likely won’t survive in the presidential debates." I wouldn't be so certain that these nuances survive the primaries.
And to tie all of these elements together, let me end by reflecting on a little piece that I came across with Dukakis discussing illegal immigration and Mitt Romney. What a twit the guy is, but this is the model of candidate that the Republican Party of 2012 would choose to defeat Barack Obama? Come on...
