Romney wins SRLC Straw Poll - The Elephant Is Still Clueless

Mitt Romney won the Southern Republican Leadership Conference straw poll by one vote over Ron Paul.

This tells me a lot about the state of Republican politics in 2010.  We've been told over the last year or so that the Republicans want to come out of the wilderness. We're told that they learned their lesson from the American people and want to get back to being Conservative, not just in name only, but in practice. We're told that they admit they were guilty of some of the same things that Dems are guilty of, and that they are promising a new wave of political responsibility.

To a certain extent, I believe that. But the widespread popularity of Romney, to me, is an indication that Republicans still haven't figured out what real conservatives actually are griping about.

Romney can dance around the subject all he wants, but Romney Care and Obamacare are essentially the same thing, just on a different scale. Romney Care is perhaps one of the foulest things ever signed into law by a Republican. It's bankrupted Massachusetts, and is fast on it's way to totally ruining their health care system. Obamacare promises to do the same thing on a national level. Both are poison. Both are ill-conceived. Both promise things that they cannot deliver. Both are a massive power grab by government, in areas that ought to remain private.

The fact that Romney still defends his socialized medicine fiasco in Massachusetts, rather than abjectly  apologizing for it, proves that he still doesn't get it. The fact that he wins a straw poll means that many in the Republican leadership still don't get it either.