If you like the Illinois GOP, you’ll love Mitt Romney, Part 18.
Blogger John Hawkins lists five reasons – there are more – but his list is good nonetheless. Hawkins calls Romney the “the antithesis of everything the Tea Party stands for — a moderate establishment-endorsed, principle-free Rockefeller Republican.”
Here’s an excerpt from his column with the above title.
If you were trying to come up with the most atrocious candidate imaginable to go toe-to-toe with Barack Obama in 2012, you couldn’t do much better than Mitt Romney. He was an unpopular moderate governor who lost 2 out of the 3 major elections he’s run in and whose signature issue Romneycare is an enormous failure. […]
1) Mitt Romney is the bailout king of American politics: Just about the only thing that the Tea Partiers and Occupy Wall Street agree on is that they really hated the bailouts. Yet, Mitt Romney is the bailout king of American politics. You could fairly argue that he took a bailout when he was at Bain, he supported TARP, he’s now comparing what he did at Bain to what Obama did at GM and Chrysler, and he has noted in a debate that he’s open to future bailouts…
2) He’s not a flip-flopper, we swear: John Kerry’s campaign in 2004 was hurt badly by the charge that he was a flip-flopper. Mitt Romney is also a flip-flopper — a far worse one than Kerry ever was… Yet, Mitt Romney’s line is that “I’ve been as consistent as human beings can be.” […]
3) [W]hat some conservatives seem to be starting to lose sight of in their efforts to defend Mitt Romney is that not everything that creates a profit is moral, good, admirable, or even politically palatable. We’d never run a candidate who got rich running a chain of strip clubs, closing all his factories and sending the jobs to China, or by being the world’s most effective spammer…
Along similar lines, it’s not particularly admirable to buy a company, load it up with debt, run it into the ground, and walk away with an enormous profit while the business goes under and hundreds of poor and middle class Americans lose their jobs – which is a very fair description of some of the deals Mitt made at the end of his tenure at Bain…
4) Read Mitt’s lips: He wants a VAT: Like Barack Obama, Mitt Romney is open to the same sort of value added tax that has helped drive the tax rates of Western European nations into the stratosphere.
5) Why support Romneycare and oppose Obamacare? Obamacare is nothing but Romneycare on a larger scale. “Even Mitt’s consultants on Romneycare, like Jonathan Gruber, have admitted that Obamacare is just Romneycare writ large.”
The truth is that the Affordable Care Act is essentially based on what we accomplished in Massachusetts. It’s the same basic structure applied nationally.