If one looks at the background of Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts, it is clear that he is a moderate Republican, both in his statements from years past and his actions as Governor from 2003-2007.
He brought about the first mandated health care, and Massachusetts has benefited greatly from it, but yet Romney desperately wants the Republican nomination for President, which escaped his father’s grasp in 1968, so has decided to “sell his soul” to become President.
So as early as 2007, out of office, he was claiming he was a conservative, but it was clear he was a chameleon, willing to change his views to fit the audience, so he came across to many people in the past Presidential race as phony and self serving.
Now he has, in a speech at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the state in which his father was Governor in the 1960s, repudiated his own Massachusetts “RomneyCare” as a plan unacceptable beyond the Bay state, without explaining why except to invoke states rights, a weird thing for a Northern Republican to use as an excuse.
He was basically apologizing for his own health care plan, and his body language showed how awkward the situation was, and it indicates that he senses that it is an albatross around his neck, which he is trying to overcome. But meanwhile, the conservative Wall Street Journal made it clear that any kind of health care plan along the lines of the Romney Massachusetts plan is totally unacceptable for the Republican Party nominee in 2012.
So Romney is between “the devil and the deep blue sea”, in the sense that by repudiating his own health care plan he looks inconsistent and self indulging, but even by doing this does not make his quest for the nomination any the easier in a race where his opponents can use that plan as a weapon against him!