3. Moderators have not asked Romney a challenging health-care question. The key to tripping someone up in a debate is asking him a question he is unprepared for. It’s not obvious that those who have moderated the GOP debates are up to the task. Romney is well-practiced at answering the “Romneycare is different from Obamacare” question, and delivers his rejoinder with confidence. A stronger line of criticism — one that almost no one has employed — would be to point out how Romneycare has worsened the free rider problem, increased the cost of health insurance, and worsened emergency room crowding. Romney’s successor has been forced to try to clean up the mess by raising taxes and instituting price controls on insurance premiums. Even these points, however, are hard to pursue in a thirty-second format.
2. The eight-candidate, sound-bite debate format plays to Romney’s advantage. Because the debates must give sufficient air time to each of eight candidates, it has been difficult to ask follow-up questions and pursue the weaknesses in Romney’s well-crafted statements. The format of the Palmetto Freedom Forum would have been ideal for discussing health care policy, but that debate focused more on constitutional and social issues. For Romney’s rivals, it was a missed opportunity.
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