RUSH: Romney is working behind the scenes to get all these states to move the primaries up. Romney wants the votes to be taken now because I think that they know that… Well, Dan Henninger has a great piece in the Wall Street Journal: “The Unsinkable Mitt Romney — The candidate will have to be pushed a lot harder to make him a good president.” Henninger’s point is that Romney hasn’t had any competition yet. He’s gonna have to be pushed to be a consistent conservative because it’s not his instinct. He’s gonna have to be pushed there. “He could be president. But in the current Obama morass, so could 100 other people. What voters, including Republican voters, want for the United States now is the best president possible. Mr. Romney isn’t there yet. Only more competition or criticism will get him there,” and he doesn’t want that.
He wants these primaries moved up. Drudge had a story: The New Hampshire primary December 6th? So it’s clear the Romney people are trying to move it up and the reason they’re trying to move it up is they know that he’s vulnerable. You know, a lot of people have asked me, “Rush, why do you think none of those candidates hit Romney up on his advisors helping Obama put together Obamacare?” That’s a damn good question, but the question that he asked Michele Bachmann, as I mentioned yesterday, was clearly a question to elevate her; maybe put the notion out that she is being considered for veep as a way of bringing the Tea Party along, ’cause it wasn’t really a question. It was, “You’ve got some great ideas on jobs. Would you expand on that?” In a debate!
So it’s clear that the Romney people think that Bachmann has no chance; she’s out of the race. That’s what that question meant: That she’s not a factor now, so let’s see if we can bring her in and make people think that we might be considering putting her on the ticket as a means of co-opting the Tea Party people. So there are a lot of interesting dynamics. Newt did not press Romney; I don’t know why. Perry didn’t praise Romney on it. There are a couple theories that Perry is laying low on purpose, and just waiting… I’m just telling you what the theories are. There are a couple stories today. (paraphrasing) “If you give up on Perry now, the story says, you’re making a big mistake. You don’t end up being a long-term governor of the second largest state in the country by accident.”
You gotta keep an open mind about this, Snerdley. The point is that everybody is being sucked in to the notion that this is all over, and the truth of the matter it really hasn’t even begun yet. Mitt Romney is not even really being challenged yet. You stop and think about it. So Mr. Henninger’s point is we’re gonna have to have more of that. He makes a great point. Anybody could get elected against Obama right now! That’s the real world. “So could a hundred other people,” Henninger writes. What we want is the best possible president. We don’t want to settle for something. Okay, you can stop with it… (laughing) I have 50,000 people now telling me how to pronounce the chairman of the RNC’s name [Reince Priebus]! Now I’ve got disagreements. One person says it’s “Rines” Priebus and the other says “Ritz” Priebus. So… (interruption) That’s what you’ve heard most is “Rence” Priebus.
Okay, the Henninger piece a great piece. Now, over the years Romney has steadily drifted to the right because of constant pressure from conservatives, but that’s not what we want. We don’t want somebody that has to be moved! We don’t want somebody has to be pushed to the right. We’d rather have somebody that’s there because that’s where their heart is. Now, the Tea Party, they know all about the establishment. They came together to fight the establishment of both parties. The Tea Party knows exactly what’s going on here.
Anyway, let me take a break here ’cause I’ve been — I’ve been promising to get to these sound bites here of the Romney advisor.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Henninger’s point, for all of you out there getting negative, the fact anybody can get elected right now, that’s Henninger at the Wall Street Journal saying that. We know that. This has been my point all along. This is why we need a conservative. We don’t need to pussyfoot around. We don’t need to play the usual games about trying to appease the independents. The independents are just as ticked off as everybody else is about what’s been done to the country.
At any rate, last night on PMSNBC’s Last Word hosted by Larry O’Donnell, an avowed socialist, he spoke with former Romney health care consultant and MIT professor of economics Jonathan Gruber about his having helped the regime craft health care reform. O’Donnell said, “Come on, come clean. You were in the room with Obama discussing health care reform and you did in fact work with the Romney administration in Massachusetts. Come on, Professor, you gotta tell us the truth here.”
GRUBER: 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. John McDonough, one of the other advisors who worked in both Massachusetts and advised the White House said it’s the Massachusetts bill with three more zeros, and that’s basically a good description of what the federal bill did.
RUSH: Well. Duh. John Gruber, Romney health care consultant: The truth is the Affordable Health Care Act is essentially based — that’s Obamacare — based on what we accomplished in Massachusetts. The same basic structure applied nationally. John McDonough, one of the other advisors, worked in both Massachusetts and advised the White House said it’s the Massachusetts bill with three more zeros and that’s basically a good description of what the federal bill did. So you got Romney’s own advisors out there undercutting him. Not through here. Larry O’Donnell: “So, obviously, the Massachusetts experience, with it was part of what moved him in the direction that — where he ended up?”
GRUBER: You know when I was advising both the Obama administration and Congress throughout 2009, the number of times I got asked, “How did you do it in Massachusetts? What made it work in Massachusetts?” the administration and the Congress were taking a big leap into unknown territory, and the fact that they had that example to lean on was so, I think, comforting to them in taking that step.
RUSH: Uh, the pile here just gets larger and larger. You’re listening to Jonathan Gruber, former Romney health care consultant, MIT professor of economics, about his having helped the Obama regime craft health care reform as basically a carbon copy of Romneycare. And there’s one more. Larry O’Donnell says, “Romney makes a very strong point about the Obama bill is full of taxes to pay for it, and the Romney bill did not have tax increases in it to pay for it.”
GRUBER: Yeah, that’s technically true, but intellectually not really straightforward. Basically in Massachusetts the financing for our bill came half from the federal government and half from an existing tax that former governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis had put in 1988 to finance care for the uninsured. So we didn’t have to raise tax in Massachusetts ’cause the money was already there. At the federal level we didn’t have that luxury. It wasn’t like China was gonna come pay half the cost of the Affordable Care Act. There was no bigger government coming to help us out, and so we needed to raise taxes to finance it.
RUSH: The money was already there. What that means to you is that your tax dollars were already being spent on Massachusetts health care. So the regime didn’t have another government to come in and fund his health care bill like Romney had the federal government to come in and fund his, which means you and me, so we had to raise taxes for it. This did not come up in the debate. It did not come up in the debate. And you know that these candidates knew of this. You know they knew of it. So the reason it didn’t come is fascinating to me. We can only speculate maybe a candidate here or there didn’t want to bring it up because that candidate’s already got problems somewhere else that could be commented on.
Chris Christie said the other day that any comparison between Obamacare and Romneycare would be dishonest. And now here’s Romney’s advisor bragging about it. And the Republican establishment wants to move the primary elections up to cement the Romney choice of nominee. Now, late Tuesday afternoon in Lebanon, New Hampshire, at a press conference where Christie endorsed Romney, a reporter said, “Could you comment on a report that three aides of yours advised the president on health care reform?”
ROMNEY: I don’t believe they were aides. They’re people who were consultants and so forth, but I’m sure the president got lots of ideas, but the one person he should have talked to that he never talked to was me, and if he had talked to me I’d have told him that the plan he was crafting wouldn’t work.
RUSH: (laughing) I’ve just put this out there for you, folks. This issue is not gonna go away. I do not believe that it is going to go away. Romney saying, (paraphrasing) “If Obama had just talked to me, I could have spared him,” is like Bill O’Reilly saying, “If Algore had just come on The Factor he’d be president today.” (laughing) (imitating Romney) “He talked to the wrong guy. If Obama would have called me I’d-a told him why it wasn’t gonna work.” Romney’s advisor, “It’s the blueprint. It’s the foundation,” and told him what would work and how to get the money for it.