Romney's ObamaCare Problem

In a major speech he'll deliver on health care today, Mitt Romney says he wants to repeal ObamaCare, but that’s not enough for the Wall Street Journal—it wants him to renounce RomneyCare, too. Romney is still calling the reform he enacted in Massachusetts a “success,” but in an editorial, the Journal rips it as an entitlement that has ballooned the state’s health care spending and fundamentally expanded the role of government.

“The Romney camp blames all this on a failure of execution,” it writes. “But by this cause-and-effect standard, Mr. Romney could push someone out of an airplane and blame the ground for killing him.” Romney didn't understand the ideological implications of his health care plan; he treated it as a technical problem, "as if the government can be run by management consultants." The paper's conclusion: "If he does not change his message, he might as well try to knock off Joe Biden and get on the Obama ticket.” (More Wall Street Journal stories.)