Romney and Huckabee, What a Choice

You know you're really wrong when Mike Huckabee can call you out. But that's the situation Mitt Romney finds himself in, as Michael Cannon points out below.  Huckabee says Romney's government-run health care plan with an individual mandate is a bad idea, Romney says he's still proud of his plan, which is totally different from President Obama's government-run health care plan with an individual mandate. But really, what can he do? In 17 years of seeking high political office, he is known for two things: changing his position on a surprisingly large number of issues, and his Massachusetts health care program. Which was of course the forerunner of Obamacare, as Michael Cannon and I pointed out in the video that Michael linked. So Romney is still defending a position I think we've already refuted.

Meanwhile, in speeches and interviews this week, Mike Huckabee continues to make the untenable connection between gay marriage and family breakdown that I discussed two weeks ago in the Los Angeles Times. Huckabee told reporters:

Huckabee opposes gay marriage on the grounds that, according to him, it destroys traditional families.

"There is a quantified impact of broken families," Huckabee said. "[There is a] $300 billion dad deficit in America every year...that's the amount of money that we spend as taxpayers to pick up the pieces because dads are derelict in their duties."

But what's the connection? As I wrote:

One thing gay couples are not doing is filling the world with fatherless children. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that allowing more people to make the emotional and financial commitments of marriage could cause family breakdown or welfare spending....

Social conservatives point to a real problem and then offer phony solutions.

But you won't find your keys on the thoroughfare if you dropped them in the alley, and you won't reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and preventing them from adopting orphans.

One might add that, as Huckabee knows very well, rates of divorce and unwed motherhood soared decades before anyone started agitating for gay marriage.

If Huckabee and Romney are the Republican frontrunners, President Obama must be sleeping well these days.