Centerfield

Well, John, I wished you'd asked me first. Because I could have told you that Mitt's claim of relative guiltlessness is substantively true.

This pig was never Mitt's baby. Not even close. I don't care what other accounts say about how Romney proposed it. If we had had a democratic governor, it'd be more bloated and unrealistic. With an overwhelming democratic majority in the state senate eager to make it happen while the economy was still on fire, Romney's only real choice was to either

1)act as a midwife and look like he had a little bit of power and influence as governor, meanwhile brokering a comparatively realistic bill

2) stay out of the way and let the democrats hand out 300,000 free ponies instead of 100,000

If Romney is guilty of anything here, it's the same old sin of opportunism. He was hoping things would stay good enough for long enough that this plan would look like a feather in his cap come presidential election time. Should he have just said "over my dead body?" Well, folks are free to think that. But I'm pretty sure that if he ever said that in private, Sal DiMasi and his state house buddies cheerfully explained to him that that could be easily arranged, politically speaking.

Every pol in our state knew Romney ran for governor here as a stepping stone, and that he couldn't afford to look like a feeble road apple on a big issue.

Romney did in fact start with a proposal for a very limited plan...he was well apart from what the democrats were demanding. In the link you provided, I notice this bit of foolishness parading as righteous insight:

Clintonian parsing is now Romnian parsing — “The bill that I submitted to the Legislature didn’t cost $1 more than what we were already spending….” Notice how he did NOT say “the bill I signed.” That is, the Legislature added a lot of “bells and whistles” to the original bill he submitted, and HE signed the result. Especially given that he vetoed certain items in the bill that came to his desk, whose fault is it that any “bells and whistles” remained?

Yeah, sure. I am at a loss to explain what part of "gigantic vetoproof democratic majority" the writers at bi-z-z-yblog don't understand.

It's ludicrous to call this program Mitt Romney's handiwork, but since Mitt would have been eager to do so had it been hanging together in a better economy, it IS fair to say that he brought that shit upon himself. Like Tully says, he packed the bags, and now he has to carry the luggage.

Exactly.

But KK is right, Romney didn't birth this baby, he just did the bris.