Romney's Health Care Speech Is Essentially A Speech On Romney's Entire Candidacy

If you want to get a feel for how difficult it's going to be for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to thread the needle he needs to thread in his "major speech on health care today," Jon Ward's piece on these pages from yesterday is a great place to start. Yes, Romney will, in all likelihood, make it clear that as President, his Day One task will be scuttling the Affordable Care Act, but the internecine opposition he's drawing on his own health care record is going to be difficult to surmount. When Grover Norquist is telling you that your singular legislative achievement is a "boat anchor" around your neck, and Karl Rove is opining that your based-in-Federalism argument is insufficient to the task of defending your actions as governor, your problems are legion.

Jon's piece came ahead of an absolutely brutal editorial in The Wall Street Journal, which will only make matters worse. The sting comes right in the sub-hed: "Mitt Romney's ObamaCare Problem." And it contains paragraphs like this one:

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