With 419 delegates at stake in elections across the country Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum attempted to revive Mitt Romney’s single largest policy liability by accusing his rival of misleading voters about “Romneycare.”
“He’s not someone that you can just trust on the issue of big government,” Santorum said on a Monday conference call with reporters about the health care plan enacted by Romney in Massachusetts. Critics say the plan directly inspired President Obama’s health care law.
Santorum said Romney’s strategy on responding to questions about the Massachusetts health care plan is to “mislead and to try to obfuscate by throwing negative ads at someone.”
“That’s the underlying problem that I hear — and I talk to people all over — they just don’t trust Mitt Romney to not do what’s the fashionable thing of the moment,” he said.
He said Romney “throughout the course of not just his governorship, but afterwards, was an advocate for the individual mandate [and] continued to advocate for it not just in Massachusetts but for the federal government.”
Aware of Santorum’s conference call with reporters, Romney’s campaign released a statement before the Santorum call even took place.
“Rick Santorum has a habit of creating distortions, exaggerations and falsehoods about Mitt Romney’s record,” said Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Romney.
“Over the last several years, Governor Romney has said many times, in many different formats, that his health care reform plan was the right model for Massachusetts, and that it should not be used as a one-size-fits-all national health insurance plan,” she said.
“Romney is a federalist and has always said that states should be free to come up with their own health care reforms.”