Given that Romney is running as an establishment conservative for the Republican nomination, the friendly connection to the rival party’s leader and his most prominent policy achievement would be, well, kind of awkward. But when the Massachusetts law first took effect, Romney did praise a different prominent liberal collaborator as one of the law’s “parents” whose work was “absolutely essential” to passage: former Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, a longtime universal coverage advocate whose proposed
1975 health care overhaul was ditched after the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would cost three times what Kennedy’s staff had claimed.
