As our own Mark Schmitt said in a legendary post back in 2004, "It's not what you say about the issues, it's what the issues say about you." Issues, in other words, matter in elections not because voters are choosing between competing agendas, but because they help define each candidate's identity. This is particularly true in primaries, where issue differences between candidates tend to be small.
Which brings us to poor Mitt Romney, the putative front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, who will be trudging through the snows of Iowa with a millstone around his neck, one called RomneyCare. As Greg Sargent says, "Conservatives are insistent that Romney explain his previous support for the individual mandate, in order to prove he's not ideologically suspect, but when he does try to explain it, he only reinforces the sense that he's ideologically malleable and opportunistic." Conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin says that " if there is one point of consensus among plugged-in Republicans on the 2012 field, it is that Romney can't win unless he does a mea culpa on RomneyCare." But as David Frum puts it, "If Romney does not apologize for Romneycare, he's dead. Of course if he does apologize, he is deader."
I'm with Frum, at least on the "deader" part. Romney's big problem, of course, is that everyone thinks he's unprincipled and untrustworthy. And nothing would reinforce that idea more than him repudiating and apologizing for his biggest accomplishment as Massachusetts governor, after spending years talking about what a great thing it was. So the question for him is, which will make Republican primary voters hate him more: a flip-flop even bigger than the one he pulled on abortion, or some desperate hair-splitting on the details of the Massachusetts health care plan in the service of a weak argument that it's totally different from that socialist Obamacare?
The answer seems pretty obvious: Mitt's no dummy, and he is not, repeat, not going to apologize. He may give you an unpersuasive argument about Romneycare, but he's smart enough to know that "dead" is better than "deader." And who knows what will happen a year from now -- after all, John McCain was dead as a dornail for quite a while in 2007, and he ended up with the privilege of getting his butt kicked by Barack Obama. The same thing could happen to Romney.
