Free Republic

A new poll shows Mitt Romney, who is locked in a prolonged GOP nomination fight, with lagging approval ratings, raising questions about his strength in a likely November match-up with President Obama. Half of those surveyed hold unfavorable views of the GOP front-runner, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll released Wednesday finds. In the poll, 50 percent of all surveyed and 52 percent of registered voters held unfavorable opinions of Romney. Thirty-four percent hold positive views on Romney, the lowest for any leading presidential contender in Post/ABC polls dating back to 1984. The poll also finds that Romney’s unfavorability tops...

...Romney said, “If they are 45 years old and they show up and say I want insurance because I have heart disease, it’s like, hey guys. We can’t play the game like that. You’ve got to get insurance when you are well and then if you get ill, you are going to be covered.”

Daniel Larison catches Mitt Romney trying to have it both ways on the $700 billion bank bailout: Romney says he was for Henry Paulson's good TARP but he's against Tim Geithner's bad TARP. Conveniently, this allows Romney to position himself as effectively anti-TARP under Obama while he was a supporter under Bush. Larison correctly argues, "One can either recognize that the original TARP was always potentially an opaque slush fund to be used for whatever purpose the executive branch wanted, and it was therefore an outrageous measure that ought to have been defeated, or one can accept the abuses of...