Romney aide riles conservative allies

Mitt Romney drew new fire from conservative allies on a familiar topic Wednesday — health care — as his spokesman offered unusual praise for his efforts on the issue as Massachusetts governor.

In an interview with Fox News Channel on Wednesday, Andrea Saul invoked Massachusetts’s expansion of health coverage as a defense to a harsh new ad funded by a super political action committee supporting President Barack Obama. In the spot, a steelworker whose plant was closed by Bain Capital blames Romney, who co-founded the firm, for his family’s loss of health insurance and his wife’s subsequent death from cancer.

“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Gov. Romney’s healthcare plan, they would have had health care,” Saul said in the interview. “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President Obama’s economy.”

The comments were unusual for a campaign that has typically steered clear of the 2006 Massachusetts overhaul, sensitive to conservatives’ concerns that the program too closely mimics the Democratic health-care law they are determined to undo.

At an event in Iowa on Wednesday, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee offered his Massachusetts experience to show that he is an expert on healthcare overhauls.

“We’ve got to do some reforms in health care, and I have some experience doing that, as you know,” he told a crowd, after receiving a standing ovation for repeating his promise to repeal Obama’s law.

Romney has always maintained that although overhaul efforts worked for Massachusetts, the federal government should not force a similar solution on the nation.

He has said that on his first day as president, he would sign an executive order offering states a waiver to opt out of the law and would sign any repeal legislation passed by Congress.

Although he has never disavowed the Massachusetts effort, he has often appeared hesitant to discuss the program, which drew harsh criticism from his Republican rivals during the presidential primaries. The Massachusetts and federal programs both include a core requirement that participants buy medical insurance or pay a fee.

The twin moments of praise Wednesday for the Massachusetts program elicited immediate howls of protest from conservatives. After all, they argued, if Romney believes expanding health coverage through a government program was a positive development for Massachusetts residents, couldn’t Democrats argue that other Americans should receive similar protections?

“Andrea Saul’s appearance on Fox was a potential gold mine for Obama supporters,” conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday. “They can say, ‘Romneycare was the basis for our health care.’” Conservative commentator Erick Erickson termed Saul’s remark an “an unforced error of monumental idiocy” that resurfaced conservative wariness of Romney.

In the Priorities USA super PAC ad to which Saul was responding, Joe Soptic, a former employee at GST Steel in Kansas City, Mo., says he no longer had health insurance after losing his job at the company. Without coverage, Soptic’s wife, Ranae, died of cancer.

But the ad does not note that Romney had left Bain by the time GST Steel declared bankruptcy in 2001. And Soptic’s wife died in 2006, five years after the plant closed.

The Obama campaign refused to call on Priorities USA Action to pull the ad. Bill Burton, a former White House aide and co-founder of the group, defended it.

Obama was in Colorado, where he embraced the “Obamacare” tag that Republicans long ago hung on the law.

“I actually like the name because I do care,” he said in an appearance before an audience largely made up of women.

Obama told his Denver audience that Romney and Republicans support policies “more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century.”