I order you to be responsible!

Geez Louise. After all the histrionics about reinventing government and making Washington less important, Mitt Romney is the best Republicans can do? But he's been around, put in his time, so it's his turn, and that's what the GOP does. Or maybe he does fit Bill Buckley's definition of "most electable conservative." Still, this is not exactly encouraging:

It seems like it. Mitt Romney today stood by Romneycare as completely and forcibly as he ever has. It seems he's making the argument the individual mandate is conservative in a roundabout attempt to prove that he has been consistently conservative throughout his political career.

“I'm happy to stand by the things I believe,” Romney told Fox News. “I'm not going to change my positions by virtue of being in a presidential campaign. What we did was right for the people of Massachusetts. The plan is still favored there by 3:1 — and it is fundamentally a conservative principle because the people take personal responsibility rather than turning to the government for free care.”

Yes, "people taking responsibility instead of turning to government " is a fundamentlly conservative idea. But a mandate does not recognize personable responsibility. It assumes that people exercising free will cannot be trusted to make the right choice, which must be forced upon them by a government that knows better. That's about as liberal an idea as there is.

Yesterday, I gave E.J. Dionne a hard time for twisting the word "conservative" to make it apply to President Obama. This may be even more Orwellian. If this is what Mitt Romney thinks conservatism is, could someone tell me how a Washington under him would differ from Washington under Obama?