“In a world where others have lost their liberty by trading it away for the false promises of the state, we choose to hold to our founding principles. We will stop these power-seekers where they stand,” he said at CPAC.
In the book, Romney will have a framework for his vision, Schriefer said. “He now has a touchstone – I don’t think he had that yet going into ’08,” he said.
Romney also took time to lash Obama’s struggling health care legislation as everything from bureaucratic to unconstitutional. But where his advisers see a man able to pick his spots, critics see a candidate forced to avoid an issue that has shaped the conservative movement.
“I think some people would say he hasn’t been above the fray, that he’s been hiding from the fray,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican adman and adviser to Romney’s 2008 campaign who is no longer part of his circle. “The biggest issue in America for the past year has been what he used to tout as his signal accomplishment, and unfortunately Mitt Romney was nowhere to be found.”
FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey, a central figure in the conservative revival, also said he saw Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan, an early model for Obama’s attempt at expanded health care, as a central weakness. “What he caries with him is that Massachusetts plan and it’s a big problem,” Armey said.
Romney, with his perfectly-honed presentation and hidden weakness, recalls for some Hillary Clinton, a juggernaut until Iowa’s caucus-goers decided they didn’t quite like or trust her enough to make her president, and Romney rivals like Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have taken pains to remind voters of the resemblance between Romney’s health care plan and Obama’s.
Romney’s aides deny he’s avoiding the subject.
“Gov. Romney has been very visible on health care. He’s written op-eds on the subject, he devotes an entire chapter to it in his new book and he addresses it in nearly every interview,” said his spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, who also argued that unlike Obama’s plan, Romney’s didn’t raise taxes, and that he supported state rather than federal plans.
They also say that Clinton wasn’t brought down by a single issue, but rather by a broader distrust from her party’s base, the very thing Romney has so effectively repaired.
“These things don’t come down to individual issues,” said Schriefer. “They come down to a sense of the person in whole.”
At CPAC, Romney received standing ovations, and banged the podium and absorbed the applause with the comfort of a man at home. The movement, once deeply suspicious of him, may not have fallen in love at first sight, and Romney’s appearance lacked the buzz of CPAC’s new star, Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio. But the deep comfort inside the movement with the man introduced as “Mr. Fix-It” may be enough.
“I don’t know the last time I heard anybody say ‘I’m a Romney guy,’” said Armey. “But I don’t know that I’ve heard anybody disparage Mitt Romney either.”
Read more at Politico
