Free Republic

It's amazing that most of the presidential candidates manage to find time to run for president when they're so busy running for national superintendent of schools. Republican candidates typically tell us in one breath they want to get the federal government out of education and in the next that they have some really swell ideas for educational reform they'd like to implement (impose?) once they're in charge of the federal government. Take Mitt Romney, if you can. (I know, he can be pretty hard to take at times.) At Thursday night's (more of less) debate in Orlando, Mitt was his...

Last week, shortly before a certain ex-terrorist (now pining for the fjords) swallowed the news cycle, there were still some folks paying attention to the nascent GOP primary race. In an early stop in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney attended a forum hosted by Americans for Prosperity and moderated by Tim Phillips.It wouldn’t exactly take a modern day Nostradamus to know that Phillips was going to ask him about the health care plan he signed into law when he was the governor of the Bay State. The somewhat uncomfortable scene which then unfolded seemed to resemble a display of dancing which...

It remains to be seen whether Mitt Romney will attempt to distance himself from his disastrous health care legislation in the upcoming presidential campaign. However, from his previous statements, it is clear that he once envisioned RomneyCare as a national model. Here is what he said leading up to his failed presidential campaign. ...During a speech in Baltimore on Feb. 2, 2007, Romney outlined his ambitions for the Massachusetts plan. "I'm proud of what we've done," he said. "If Massachusetts succeeds in implementing it, then that will be a model for the nation." Last month Romney's dream came true. If...

It is tempting -- very, very tempting -- to write off Willard "Mitt" Romney as a serious contender for next year's Republican presidential nomination. And, in fact, several knowledgeable observers already have. Romney, in case you haven't heard, embraced a healthcare reform law in Massachusetts five years ago that ended up being the model for the national program that President Obama pushed through Congress without a single Republican vote last year. He's also dogged by the impression that he's an unusually spineless opportunist (the result of the extraordinary pains he took to win over socially liberal voters in Massachusetts before...

Last August, I wrote the following about Mitt Romney’s odds of winning the Republican nomination: In a sense, the stronger President Obama looks next year, the better Romney’s chances of being nominated. He needs the prospect of an uphill general-election battle to keep his potential rivals for establishment support safely on the sidelines. And then he needs that same establishment to rally around him once the primary voting starts — not out of love or admiration, but out of fear of the populist alternative. Six months later, this is almost exactly how things are playing out. In many ways, Romney...