Mitt Romney is toast

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

According to a spokesman, "Mitt Romney is proud of what he accomplished for Massachusetts in getting everyone covered."

According to that spokesman, "Romneycare" isn't like the Affordable Care Act (i.e., "Obamacare," according to Republican propaganda) because it's a single-state system, not a national one, and because "[a] one-size-fits-all plan for the entire nation just doesn't work." States, he asserted, should have "the power to determine their own healthcare solutions."

There is much to recommend Romneycare, once the sort of thing Republicans supported, but the argument that states should all have their own individual systems is silly. Moreover, the two systems are "essentially the same," as Yglesias noted last year -- Romneycare even includes a dreaded individual mandate, now the main target of opponents of the Affordable Care Act -- and Romney has been all over the place distancing himself from the Affordable Care Act. He's obviously landed now on the federal/state distinction, but that won't get him anywhere in today's GOP. Indeed, Karl Rove said last month that Romney basically needs to admit that his heath-care reform in Massachusetts was wrong and that he should apologize for it. Apparently that's not about to happen, not with Romney adamantly defending the Obama-like system that bears his name.

Prediction: Mitt Romney will not be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. He's toast. And, try as he might to protest his sufficiently right-wing cred, he's just making it worse for himself. He did a very good thing in Massachusetts, something he should be very proud of. Don't expect Republicans, and particularly the base, to give him the benefit of anything. They'll destroy him, and that will be that.

(Yes, that's the easiest prediction I've made in a long time, maybe since I picked Christine O'Donnell to lose the Delaware Senate race in a landslide. I don't claim to be a crystal ball. Some things are just obvious.)

Elephant Dung #12: Republican organization targets Scott Brown

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

Woe is Scott Brown.

Once a huge Republican star, back when he won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat and for a brief moment turned Massachusetts a little bit red, back when Republicans spun his win as a referendum defeat for Obama, back when it looked like his election would derail health-care reform, Brown is now in the party's "crosshairs," as Republicans like to say, a target of the right's purification campaign to rid the party of anyone and everything not sufficiently conservative (in a rigid, ideological, far-right way).

And even some of those who were once firmly behind him have now turned on him:

A Republican organization that backed Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) with independent expenditures and fundraising assistance says it will work to defeat Brown in a Republican primary next year in order to protect the party's brand.

Scott Wheeler, who heads the National Republican Trust PAC, said the group never expected Brown to toe a consistently conservative line, given his home state. But Brown's vote for the New START Treaty with Russia in late 2010 was a bridge too far, Wheeler said.

Now, to keep this in perspective, the NRT PAC isn't a huge organization with vast resources. Still, turning on Brown could lead to others doing the same:

[T]he PAC has a national network of donors, and Wheeler promised he would use the committee's resources against Brown.

"We're going to finance a primary opponent," he said. "I might even ask him to give our money back."

To Brown's credit -- even if he knows that he has to be somewhat moderate to play well back home -- he has been one of the few Republicans to break from the party's intransigent obstructionism. He may once have voted against Red Cross volunteers, but he did, as senator, vote with the Democrats to move a jobs bill forward, as well as against a Republican filibuster of an unemployment benefits and tax credits bill. And then he voted not just for New START but for DADT repeal as well. That's not a bad record for a Republican...

Unless you're a Republican and your party is turning against you because -- how dare you! -- you voted with Obama and the Democrats on something and aren't as extremist as most of the rest of the GOP.

Brown is quite popular in Massachusetts and may well defeat any right-wing challenger. Indeed, he may just win re-election. At the very least, Republicans would be stupid not to pick him, as he's their only chance for victory. (And Massachusetts isn't, say, Utah, so the right, including the Tea Party, may not prevail even in a primary vote that generally rewards right-wing turnout and grassroots campaigning.)

But it's a sign of the times, and a sign of where the Republican Party is (and is heading), that a popular and, in Massachusetts, electable moderate (relatively speaking) is being targeted by some in his own party. (I suspect that the national and state party establishments will stand by him.) He's just not Republican enough, you see -- not enough of what the likes of Limbaugh and Palin want.

Better to be "right" than to win, it would seem, even if so many Republicans crazily think that the best way to win is to move further and further to the right. And that's fine for Democrats, who should be able to pick up a Senate seat in Massachusetts if the Republicans are stupid enough to purify success out of the party.

So, absolutely, let's hope Republicans really do see Scott Brown as a pro-Obama liberal who will vote with the Democrats. (That's what he is, isn't he? Isn't he one of us? Yes, Republicans, you can trust us!)

And let's hope Brown gets the primary challenger he deserves.