Batt’n down the hatches, Jed Lewinson features this interesting quip by Willard of Romney waaay back in 2007, where the foundering front-runner seems to propose his version of the hated Obama-care as a model for the entire nation:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Romney and Mayor Giuliani, are either one of you for the expansion of children’s health insurance, as outlined by Senator Grassley?
MITT ROMNEY: Look, it’s critical to insure more people in this country. It doesn’t make sense to have 45 million people without insurance. It’s not good for them because they don’t get good preventative care and disease management, just as these folks have spoken about. But it’s not good for the rest of the citizens either, because if people aren’t insured, they go to the emergency room for their care when they get very sick. That’s expensive. They don’t have any insurance to cover it. So guess who pays? Everybody else. So it’s not good for the people that aren’t insured. It’s not good for everybody else. [Crosstalk] …
We have to have our citizens insured, and we’re not going to do that by tax exemptions, because the people that don’t have insurance aren’t paying taxes. What you have to do is what we did in Massachusetts. Is it perfect? No. But we say, let’s rely on personal responsibility, help people buy their own private insurance, get our citizens insured, not with a government takeover, not with new taxes needed, but instead with a free-market based system that gets all of our citizens in the system. No more free rides. It works.

Once upon a time not that long ago, using private insurers to cover uninsured and provide government assistance with the premiums for poor or out of work people was considered a conservative idea, even advanced by conservative think tanks, and it was htis framework that Romney used when he was a governor. But then Obama used the same frameowrk for the Affordable Care Act, and only then did it become unbridled socialism hated by all good and normal decent Americans. Which is when Romney began a largescale retreat against his own idea, usually claiming it was only intended to be used at the state level. This video exposes Romney’s transparent lie. Not that there was any doubt, but this seals it.

Will this further complicate the Romney’s hard run to the primary right? Hard to say. The religious right takes the best part of religion, cult-like mindless obedience to The Leader no matter how crazy or dangerous the leader’s decrees are, and applies it to politics. Things like consistency, intellectual honesty, and results fall prey to preferred fantasy and familiar ritual. But it remains to be seen if that apparatus can be successfully harnessed — or even stay intact — by a follower of what mainstream Christian authorities often deem a heretic.

If the Santorum surge holds long enough to deny Romney clear wins in Michigan or on Super TRuesday, he’s in real trouble. And if I were the Santorum Super PAC I’d be running that segment above, with text explaining the Obamacare connection, 24/7 in those states. You know what time it is!?