re: #195 Fat Bastard Vegetarian

I think that Romney would serve his candidacy nicely if he said, “My American friends; I have already proven that this can not work in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; and am determined that we do not point our country down the same path. While I am still glad that we tried; but as far as controlling costs and being affordable; this has been a cataclysmic failure. I accept full responsibility for my lack of foresight on this issue. I only wish that our Federal Government had learned a lesson about how this has turned out for our substantial, but small state.”

The big issue with Romney selling himself of his Massachusetts record is that he really didn’t have much power to stop the legislature from doing what it wanted. The Democrats had an 80% majority in the state house and controlled 34 out of the 40 state senate seats. Romney had 707 of his 814 budgetary line item vetoes overridden, some unanimously. He didn’t do too well on non-budget issues either. Needle sharing and eight sections of the mass health care law made it through his veto. The minimum wage increase got over-ridden unanimously. The only thing I can remember him killing was a hate crimes taskforce whose budget he zeroed out in his first year in office.