Dept. of Irony: GOP Flip-Flop on the Individual Mandate in 2009 Could Cost Them the Presidency in 2012

In the video clip above from the Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., in June 2008, Mitt Romney defends the individual mandate as a right-wing solution to universal health care:

ROMNEY: [So we in Massachusetts] said: No more free riders. It was like bringing “workfare” to welfare. We said: If you can afford insurance, then either have the insurance or get a health savings account. Pay your own way, but no more free ride.

And that was what the mandate did. It said, you have got to come with either the insurance or a health savings account or the like.

I think it’s the conservative approach, to make sure that people who can afford care are getting it at their expense, not at the expense of the taxpayers and government. That I consider to be a step towards socialism.

Republicans were not only for the individual mandate before they were against it, they invented it in the 1990s. Now, of course, Romney’s enacting the mandate statewide when he was governor of Massachusetts is a contributing factor to his fading prospects in the 2012 campaign.

Flip-flopping on support for their own policies has become reflexive for Republicans in the Obama era. Every time the president caves on his own party’s principles in favor of GOP demands, Republicans pivot, reverse course and oppose their own ideas. (Insert Charlie Brown-Lucy football analogy here.)

For example, cap and trade was the official position of the Palin/McCain presidential ticket in 2008. Now, of course, no Republican who supports it can be considered a viable presidential candidate. Similarly, the Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded under Reagan as an alternative to Welfare. Now the GOP rails against it, demanding tax hikes on the poor.

In the upcoming session, Republicans plan to oppose extending the payroll tax cut, not on principle, of course, but because Obama wants it extended. If Republicans prevail, the result will be a tax increase on payrolls. Never mind that nearly every Republican in Congress has signed Grover Norquist’s blood oath that they will oppose tax increases — he’ll give them a pass on this one because it serves the right-wing cause of hobbling the economic recovery and thus contributing to making the president fail. (If undercutting the recovery also hurts these Republicans’ congressional constituents, so be it. Their voters are just collateral damage on the march toward corporate oligarchy.)

But the granddaddy of all Republican flip-flops is the individual mandate. As we noted in June, the mandate was invented at the right-wing “think” tank, Heritage Foundation, in the 1990s, as the conservative universal health-care alternative to the Clinton plan that known as Hillarycare.

In 2006, Gov. Romney adapted the Heritage plan and its individual mandate into the statewide universal coverage plan that Republicans now refer to derisively as Romneycare.

In 2009, when Pres. Obama rejected the liberal position on universal coverage — a single-payer, Medicare-for-everyone plan — and adopted the Heritage Foundation’s individual mandate, the Republican propaganda machine went into overdrive. By the end of the tea party’s astroturf summer, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest, funded by millions of dollars from corporatist sources like the Koch brothers, Freedomworks, Tea Party Express and others, had erased the mandate’s conservative roots from the national memory banks and redefined it in the public mind as a freedom-destroying tool of jack-booted, Kenyan socialism.

It was a clever trick, and a splendid demonstration of the power of the GOP-Fox-Limbaugh propaganda apparatus to convince half-wits — along with their corporate media poodles — that black is white and up is down.

Now, however, if current trends in the GOP primaries prevail, the Republican propagandists’ redefinition of Obamacare, now known as Obamneycare, as socialism could end up costing their party the White House next year.

There are only two candidates in the field who have chance of winning independent votes in November 2012 — Mitt Romney and Jon Hunstman. If the election plays out as the Obama campaign and many campaign experts expect, with Democrats and Republicans all falling in line behind their party’s nominees, creating a 48-48 split, the 2012 election will be decided 51-49 by the independent vote.

But with Republican primary voters now fully invested in the GOP’s Big Lie that Obamneycare is socialism, Romney is fading in the polls behind Rick Perry, the Texas governor whom a former Republican governor once described as George Bush without the brains.

Meanwhile, Huntsman, a moderate former governor of Utah and formerly Obama’s ambassador to China, has yet to poll above single digits. At this point, it would take a miracle for him to come from behind.

So that leaves Gov. Perry, the third most polarizing figure in the race behind Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, as the Republican Party’s likely nominee.

But Perry has signaled that he is determined to revive the Republicans’ failed, Pat Buchanan-led culture wars of 1992. If he does, he’ll likely repulse independent voters, who have a) moved on from the gay-hating and abortion wars and b) are seeking practical solutions to the country’s economic woes. And Perry reportedly has a few secrets in his closet as well as few dings on his public record that have yet to come out — including the fact that he balanced the budget in Texas with a $6.6 billion bailout from Washington.

By nominating Perry, the GOP would likely cede the floor to Pres. Obama, who, at this early moment in the campaign, appears to have the weaker reelection chances than Harry Truman, who won in 1948, and Jimmy Carter, who lost in 1980. Much of what has put Obama is in this weak position is his disinterest playing hardball with Republicans — a disinterest he shares with Carter. It’s this pragmatism that drives his reflexive capitulations to Republican anti-growth policies on the economy, even though it has to be obvious to him that they are pursuing these policies for the sole purpose of weakening his presidency.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Republicans’ multimillion dollar rebranding of their own universal coverage health-insurance plan in 2009 handed the White House to the foreign-born, not-white-enough socialist they despise in 2012?

Here is the transcript of Romney’s defense of the individual mandate from the 2008 presidential campaign:

JIM VANDEHEI, POLITICO: The first question from the readers, Governor Romney, is from Jonathan Rubin (ph) in Fairfax, Virginia.

“As governor of Massachusetts, Senator McCain just pointed out you raised hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue through so-called fees and loophole closings. You passed a health care bill forcing individuals to buy insurance on the threat of a fine. How do you reconcile that policy with your claim to be the authentic conservative?”

ROMNEY: Well, let’s talk about each.

I mentioned fees, and I think it’s appropriate if the state is providing a service to someone that’s not a requirement to have a car or a driver’s license, but instead, let’s say, we’re going to be taking out an oil tank from your back yard because it’s leaking into the ground and the state’s going to provide that service. But to charge a fee sufficient to do so makes a lot of sense.

And so the fees ought to be adjusted from time to time to compose the amount of what the cost is of providing that service. And if there hasn’t been a fee raised in a couple of decades, you probably have some inflation in there you ought to adjust for.

ROMNEY: But then, secondly, with regards to my health care plan, let me describe what I think is the ultimate conservative approach.

In this country, you have today about 47 million people that don’t have health insurance. We went out and tried to find out why they don’t. We found out that about half of them could afford to buy insurance if it were reasonably priced. They could afford to buy it, but they weren’t buying it. it? If we get sick, we can go to the hospital and get care for free.”

And we said: You know what? If somebody could afford insurance, they should either buy the insurance or pay their own way. They don’t have to buy insurance if they don’t want to, but pay their own way. But they shouldn’t be allowed to just show up at the hospital and say, somebody else should pay for me.

And so we said: No more free riders. It was like bringing “workfare” to welfare. We said: If you can afford insurance, then either have the insurance or get a health savings account. Pay your own way, but no more free ride.

And that was what the mandate did. It said, you have got to come with either the insurance or a health savings account or the like.

I think it’s the conservative approach, to make sure that people who can afford care are getting it at their expense, not at the expense of the taxpayers and government. That I consider to be a step towards socialism.

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