reagan was reagan in 19 779 and 1980 and the extraordinary speech at the convention. mo romney is no reagan. no, he s no ronald reagan, but i think the underlying conditions in the country are such that we re guaranteed a close race. and if mitt romney can get out of this unfortunate trap that he s in now of having to fight rick santorum on the right and try to run the campaign he always intended to run, i think he s got a shot. what does it say about a candidate, though, who wrote an op-ed in 2009 saying that, please apply what we did in massachusetts nationally on an individual mandate, and then goes on the campaign trail yesterday and just lies? i hate to be that blunt. i hate to use that word. is does anybody disagree with my characterization of what he
paradigm. it s not a fair fight. but you don t want to talk about it. you want to talk about iran instead. and that s smart. it will probably be one of the defining issues of this election, iran. iran. iran. and i just think we should focus on the issues. we should focus on the issues du jour. it s kind of embarrassing, isn t it? he goes out there and says, i never said what i said. well very good. mika has an op-ed she wants to focus on. i do. it s on romney s piece in the washington post. he doesn t want to talk about the individual mandate. he doesn t. that it lacks strategic vision. but we ll read it later. that was a tease, okay. i d like to bring in from washington the pulitzer prize-winning columnist of the washington post, msnbc contributor, eugene robinson. it s great to talk to you this morning. thanks for being here. great to be here. before we go to the health
coming up. can we continue on this, though? this is important. well, it is incredibly important. what does it say about a candidate who has faced with an op-ed that he wrote a few years ago goes in front of people and tells them something that he knows is not true, that the press knows is not true, and that the people in the audience knows it s not true? i think it s the case that one of the things we ve seen over the course of the republican nomination fight is that mitt romney is not an a-plus political performer. and he seems to operate and this actually goes to one of the broader questions from this op-ed. one of the things that s true back in reagan s day was that, you know, he could make a dumb joke, a dumb ethnic squojoke, at was not immediately known by everyone in the country. the media environment was so different. we didn t have the internet. we didn t have everything archived, everything on video. camera phones. camera phones. everything is immediately there,
everybody at home now experiencing pain in their teeth because of what mark halperin just said. dr. halperin. so mitt s coming under fire who what he said in a 2009 op-ed arguing the massachusetts health care plan he enacted could be used as a model for the country. and this is what he said. he said the president could learn from the plan he enacted as governor of massachusetts. and here we go. this is while obamacare was being debated. first, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance, using tax penalties as we did or tax credits as others have proposed encourages free riders to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others. that s the individual mandate. this wasn t the only time he spoke in favor of the individual mandate. in 2006 in an interview with human events, he was asked whether his health care plan should go national. and this is what romney said. i think what we ve crafted