MITT ROMNEY CHANNELS JOHN EDWARDS. This is a bit of an old story already, but I think it’s still worth noting for the historical record, since I haven’t seen it noted elsewhere, that John Edwards, not Mitt Romney, was the first presidential candidate to propose making health insurance mandatory. Romney’s just the first to get that approach to health care policy enacted into law — an outcome attributable to the difference between being a senator from a conservative state and the governor of a liberal one.

–Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.