Plouffe Points Out that Romney Will Rubber Stamp the Tea Party Agenda

This is so not what Mitt needs right now. On “Meet the Press” this morning, Senior Advisor David Plouffe pointed out that Mitt Romney would be a rubber stamp for the Tea Party if elected. The Tea Party does not poll well, and indeed the Republican Congress has taken a beating in the polls since the 2010 tea infusion.

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PLOUFFE: Governor Romney if he’s elected has promised he’ll plunge this Congress and this country into a bitter battle over repealing health care. Do we think that’s really going to help the tone in Washington? Absolutely not. He has promised to rubber stamp a Tea Party agenda. You know, Senator Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, put out a statement Friday saying, ya know, the Romney agenda is DOA. So the notion that somehow Governor Romney’s going to come in here and rubber stamp a Tea Party agenda, plunge the country into a health care fight, and that’s going to help solve the dysfunction in Washington, it’s going to be worse.

We had to laugh when Romney claimed that he would be bipartisan. Yeah, Mitt Romney who can’t stand up to Rush Limbaugh is somehow going to magically change when he moves into his Barbie dream house in D.C. Harry Reid pointed out that the very things Romney was promising to find consensus on are things that the Tea Party has already floated but did not pass in Congress.

Reid scoffed at Romney’s magical thinking, “Mitt Romney’s fantasy that Senate Democrats will work with him to pass his ‘severely conservative’ agenda is laughable.”

It’s not as if Romney has a history of bipartisanship, as his 800 vetoes prove — most of which were overridden, some unanimously — by the Massachusetts legislature. Bipartisanship, you say? Where?

Heck, it’s not as if Romney has a history of working with his own party. Republicans from Massachusetts don’t remember him fondly either. They recall a governor who didn’t know their names or even recognize their faces. A governor so cut off and removed that he hijacked an elevator for his own use so that he wouldn’t get stuck talking to any of them in the few minutes of an elevator ride. He stationed police around his door and a velvet rope to keep the “employees” (also known as legislators or checks and balances to executive power) out.

What world does Romney live in that he thinks he could get to D.C. and start issuing orders and the minions would obey? Even if that’s how it worked, he knows very well that he couldn’t work with the Democrats in the Massachusetts legislature and that is why when his party got hammered in the midterms, he basically quit on the state in a fit of pique. He was mostly gone for the next two years, campaigning for the presidency. The New York Times dubbed Romney the “absentee” governor. Apparently Romney thinks that things get easier when you get to D.C., not harder.

That was before Mitch McConnell announced that the Republicans only goal was to make Barack Obama a one term president. After four years of Republicans setting the country on fire in order to obstruct Obama, does Mitt Romney think that Democrats would play nicely with him as he worked to repeal Obama’s accomplishments and inflict tea steeped social Darwinism upon the people?

The truth is that Mitt Romney just wants to be president for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual governing. He didn’t like governing in Massachusetts and he didn’t have the stamina to stick around when things got tough. He couldn’t manage two years of what Obama has slogged through. Romney quit when he had a legislature that wasn’t out to get him.

Romney wants the power and the title, but not the hard work that should come with it. He has no plans of governing in a bipartisan way, and with Democrats set to keep the Senate, the notion that things would move more in D.C. under Romney is laughable. Romney would spend the first two years trying to repeal Obama’s healthcare reform out of spite (what else can you call his goal of repealing his own healthcare plan), and if he couldn’t repeal it by the law, he’d just executive order his way to revenge or once again retroactively retire.



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