Romney campaign manages to lose conservatives and normal people at the same time

Equal opportunity irritant As you might have seen, Mitt Romney's campaign is defending Romneycare by saying that people like Joe Soptic, the former steelworker who lost his job and his health care insurance when Bain Capital closed his factory, should move to Massachusetts if they want health care:

A Mitt Romney spokesperson offered an unusual counterattack Tuesday to an ad in which a laid-off steelworker blames the presumptive GOP nominee for his family losing health care: If that family had lived in Massachusetts, it would have been covered by the former governor's universal health care law.

'To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney's health care plan, they would have had health care,' Andrea Saul, Romney's campaign press secretary, said during an appearance on Fox News. 'There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President [Barack] Obama's economy.'

In other words, Mitt Romney thinks Romneycare is such a good idea that everybody without health insurance should move to Boston. Of course, that would be ridiculous, so no one will actually interpret those remarks to mean that.

Instead, when conservatives hear what the Romney campaign is saying, the question they ask themselves is this: "If Mitt Romney thinks Romneycare is such a good idea, why should I believe he'll try to repeal Obamacare?"

Meanwhile, when normal people hear it, the question they ask is: "If Mitt Romney thinks Romneycare is such a good idea, why does he keep on promising the tea party that he'll repeal it at the national level?"

And people who don't have insurance'the Joe Soptics of the world'they just don't want to live in a country in which they need to move in order to get health care coverage.