Grubergate and the Romney Blowback [with comment by Paul]

Talk of running Mitt Romney again in 2016 has died down in the aftermath of the mid-term election, where so many potential candidates look a lot stronger now, but the last nail in the coffin of a Romney repeat is his connection with Jonathan Gruber.  The video below, put together by the Obama campaign in 2012, uses Gruber extensively to attack Romney (which, once again, shows that the White House efforts to distance themselves from Gruber are totally insincere) for being a hypocrite over Romneycare, which Gruber helped design.

The video raises the essential problem with Romney from the beginning.  He is a good man and would have made a decent president, but he is at the end of the day too much of a technocrat, who doesn’t understand why we must stop empowering the Grubers of the world from imposing self-serving complexities on us.  We need a president who wants to tame the administrative state, not expand it further.  I don’t think Romney ever got that.  To be fair, a lot of Republicans don’t really get it.

PAUL adds: Steve raises a fair and valid point. As I see it, however, the real scandal surrounding Gruber isn’t that he’s a technocrat who helped design first Romenycare and then Obamacare. The scandal is that, as Gruber brags, the White House deceived the public about Obamacare and that it touted Gruber as an unbiased expert, rather than a paid shill.

Unless Romneycare was sold to the Massachusetts public through deception and/or Team Romney deceived the public about Gruber’s relationship to Romney’s administration, the blowback against Romney, though potentially considerable, may not be the last nail in his political coffin.