A principal message-maker of the Romney campaign drew criticism from conservative circles on Wednesday by suggesting that if a laid-off steel worker in an anti-Romney ad had lived in Massachusetts, he would have had health insurance and his wife might still be alive.
Andrea Saul, Mr. Romney's press secretary, meant to undermine a harsh ad by a “super PAC†supporting President Obama in which a man recounts how he his wife died from advanced cancer, implying the couple could not afford insurance because he had lost his job due to a plant shutdown tied to Bain Capital.
“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney's health care plan, they would have had health care,†Ms. Saul said on Fox News. “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President Obama's economy.â€
Ms. Saul said the ad was “despicable†and a “smear†against Mr. Romney in trying to link the candidate to the woman's death. The steel worker in the ad, Joe Soptic, lost his job when a plant owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney co-founded, closed it in 2001. Mr. Soptic's wife died in 2006, shortly after being diagnosed, according to news reports.
The Romney campaign is furious with the ad, not least because Mr. Romney left Bain in 1999 and says he had no operational control after that.
But Ms. Saul's remarks threaten to upstage that message by reminding voters of the link between the president's health care law and Mr. Romney's Massachusetts health reform in 2006. The universal mandate to buy insurance that Mr. Romney promoted helped inspire President Obama's health care overhaul.
Mr. Romney has never repudiated his health care reform, but he has said it was right only for his own state, and he has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act if elected.
That pledge may be his most potent campaign message â€" when he repeated it in Iowa on Wednesday it drew the loudest applause of his speech. But reminders of his own role in inspiring Mr. Obama's law could work against him.
A number of conservative commentators were quick to jump on Ms. Saul's remarks. Erick Erickson, the editor of of the conservative website RedState.com, posted to his blog that it could be a “read my lips†moment that alienates grass-roots Republicans.
