I attended a Mitt Romney town hall this morning. I came in thinking I could call him out for a few wild inaccuracies he made in a Piers Morgan interview, and at the same time restore my faith that moderate Republicans still had a place in what was once the Grand Old Party.
What I got, however, was a sad husk of the Mitt that gave Massachusetts a health care bill. Mitt Romney was flailing blindly, simultaneously attempting to go full-Teabagger and to stay moderate, principled, vintage Mitt.
He preferred Teabagger.
Romney went on a philippic, in his tired, roundabout way, against every policy that was instituted by the current President. Mitt dodged when he was asked his position on climate change, instead backing away from his earlier position that climate change was predominantly caused by mankind and choosing to say might be caused by mankind, but "cycles" played a greater role. He said that the individual mandate in health care was unconstitutional, while the Governor was the first to institute the mandate. He said that every economic policy that was enacted by the President contributed to the recession, though he said a week ago that Obama didn't make the recession worse, and the economic consensus is that Obama's spending immensely helped the economy. Most depressing, however, was that he claimed he would give every state a waiver to health care reform, then implicitly endorsed the privatization of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. (He said that to "save them", we would need major changes with language that mirrored GOP talking points about privatization, specifically that his fixes wouldn't affect anyone over 55.)
As such, after the town hall finished and I failed to ask my question, I dared to walk up and ask a different one directly when he had a second.
"Excuse me, Governor. You supported the repeal of health care and said that we need changes in Medicare that seemed an awful lot like privatization. Would you assure the safety of seniors in the market by mandating a nationwide ban on pre-existing conditions and lifetime caps on insurance?"
He looked around, and nervously responded that he would ban pre-existing conditions, but as I was dissatisfied by his avoidance of the second question, I asked,
"But what of the lifetime caps, which would affect seniors struck with the multiple or chronic diseases that that age brings?"
He responded with a noncommital, "I'll have to think about it", which even outside of politician-speak usually means no. However, it was not his lack of consideration of the danger seniors could be in without a ban on lifetime caps, or the clearness that even the "moderate" Republican was serf to Big Insurance.
It was his fear of giving a straight answer to a minor. I am a youngish-looking fourteen year old. And still, though the question came from a young, non-voting and presumably powerless youth, he still couldn't work up the strength to say, "No, I probably won't do that". And not to invoke Hillary Clinton's infamous "middle of the night phone call" ad, but it scares me that so many of us want to hand over the reins of one of the largest countries and the largest economy in the world to someone who can't muster the instant courage to answer a boy's question.
Tomorrowsprogressives.com