Mitt Romney Offers Excellent Interview on NPR

Governor Romney is at the top of his game in this interview that is well worth the time to listen. Romney interviews with the hosts of the show and takes several questions from callers. The interview is part of his No Apology Tour, more info at NoApology.com, and http://bit.ly/RomneyBook. A full transcript of his portion of the interview is available below the fold.

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Full Transcript: From NPR.org

But first, in 2008, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney traveled to Washington, to the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, to make this announcement.

(Soundbite of archived audio)

Mr. MITT ROMNEY (Former Republican Governor, Massachusetts; 2008 Presidential Candidate): I entered this race because I love America. And because I love America, in this time of war, I feel I have to now stand aside for our party and for our country.

CONAN: Well, this year, Governor Romney went back to CPAC, leading many people to wonder if the former presidential candidate might be, well, a future presidential candidate. In his speech, he sharply criticized President Obama.

Mr. ROMNEY: His energy should have been focused on fixing the economy, creating jobs, succeeding in our fight against radical, violent jihad in Afghanistan and Iraq and keeping us safe. Instead, he applied his time and his political capital to his ill-conceived takeover of health care and to building his personal popularity in foreign countries. He failed to focus, and so he failed.

CONAN: Mitt Romney has a new book out called “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.” If you’d like to speak with him, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org.

Mitt Romney has been kind enough to join us in our bureau in New York today. Governor Romney, good to have you with us on TALK OF THE NATION.

Mr. ROMNEY: Thank you, Neal, good to be with you.

CONAN: And by our estimation, the Iowa caucus is just 23 months away.

Mr. ROMNEY: You guys are counting, not me.

(Soundbite of laughter)

CONAN: Not you. Not you. So you don’t want to make any news today.

Mr. ROMNEY: I’m afraid not. I’ll be thinking about things like that probably well after the November elections. This is a time for us to concentrate on getting some good people elected this November and, in my opinion, getting Washington back on track.

CONAN: And a lot of people think Washington is broken and broken, well, due to the dire state of partisanship in both parties today.

Mr. ROMNEY: Well, actually during my campaign, I had big signs up that I would place at my rallies that said: Washington is broken. So I concur with the sentiment.

By the way, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people standing up and saying no to bad ideas, and I think the president’s health care plan is a bad idea. It has not been put together in the way that the American people support, and I applaud saying no to that. But the thing I think is a real concern is that we have massive challenges in this country, particularly relating to our economy and getting people back to work, that we have not dealt with honestly and directly, and we’ve got to do that or America could end up becoming far less economically successful down the road than even we’re suffering right now.

CONAN: In your book, though, you say you do agree with the idea of universal health care and that the government has to play a big part in that.

Mr. ROMNEY: Well, actually, one of the things I learned when I was governor is that we have universal health care in America already. Everybody in this country, if they become ill, goes to the emergency room, even without insurance, and is able to receive, under the law, free care.

What we decided was it was a better idea to help people get insurance than just to hand out free care at hospitals, which was very expensive and oftentimes came after somebody was already quite ill. So we found a way, we think pretty good way, to get all of our citizens insured. We think it’s going to improve their health care. Not a perfect plan, but we believe a lot better than what we had in the past.

And unlike the president’s plan, ours was a state program, not a federal program, so each state could create their own ideas. We did not have to raise taxes, and we did not cut Medicare.

CONAN: And you would urge other states do it on a state level if you were someday just possibly, maybe elected president?

Mr. ROMNEY: Well, that’s been my position for some time, which is in terms of helping people get insured, the best thing the federal government could do would be to provide the funds they already do provide to the states to help the low-income individuals who are getting health care. Let them get those funds and use the funds to subsidize the purchase of those who need some help buying health insurance.

But the other problem in health care really is going to require some work at the federal and state level, which is: How do you rein in the excessive cost of health care? And having government take it over is really not the right answer.

Cost controls just don’t work. We need to get health care to work more like a market, where the patient and the doctor have entirely different incentives than they do right now.

CONAN: Ken?

RUDIN: Governor Romney, right now as we’re speaking, President Obama is having this kind of quasi-news conference, quasi-rally, pep rally, announcing what he’s going to do with health care and, obviously, what it probably means is pushing it through through reconciliation, which means, I mean, the House will vote for the Senate version, and then reconciliation will be a majority of the Senate rather than the magic 60 we’ve seen in the past. What do you make of that tactic?

Mr. ROMNEY: You know, I think for something as important as people’s health care, which is frankly one of the most important aspects of someone’s life, that to have a highly partisan bill, which is vehemently objected by well over half of the American public who have expressed that view even in Massachusetts, that that’s a real problem for the country and probably a political challenge, as well, for the president.

I think some of his colleagues are going to feel like they’re walking the plank over this. I just don’t think it’s going to stand. Even if they pursue the nuclear option, I think you’re going to find the American people will vote out those that did so and that you’ll be able to rein back in the, what I think is a very excessive overplay of its hand by the federal government.

CONAN: Well, we’ll give listeners a chance to talk with former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. Daniel(ph) on the line from Boston.

DANIEL (Caller): Hi, Governor Romney, thank you for answering questions. What I want to ask you about is you’re talking about the health care plan, Obama’s plan, as if it’s a very radical plan, but it seems to me that it’s very similar to what was passed in Massachusetts but sort of things like caps on ban for pre-existing conditions with mandates for individuals to have insurance. And I want to say, like, how I want to ask: How is it possible that you could support the plan in Massachusetts and still talk about how great of a plan it was just a couple seconds ago, but be so opposed to Obama’s health plan? It seems inconsistent and hypocritical. And I just want to ask about that.

Mr. ROMNEY: Well, pretty straightforward, and that is that first of all, we worked our plan out on a bipartisan basis. Republicans and Democrats came together. We had differing perspectives, but we worked out something where we both felt it was a positive advance.

And so when it went before the legislature, and we have 200 people in our Senate and House combined, only two people voted no. The business community supported it, the health care community did, the advocates for the poor did. We had pretty broad consensus. And I think if you’re going to change something like health care, you need to have built that kind of consensus.

Secondly, we approached our needs on a state basis so that we could fashion a program that worked for Massachusetts. And what is working in Massachusetts would almost certainly not work in Texas because they have a very different number of uninsured in a state like Texas. So the plans need to crafted state by state.

We also did not require increased taxes. And the president’s plan requires a very substantial increase in taxes, almost a half a trillion dollars, and perhaps most importantly for our senior citizens, we certainly wouldn’t have thought of cutting Medicare as part of the program to pay for our health care program. The president’s instead, of course, cuts Medicare by some half a trillion dollars.

Finally, I’d note there’s no government insurance in the Massachusetts plan. All of the insurance that’s provided that people are able to obtain is from the private insurance companies that already exist in the state.

CONAN: There’s no government insurance in the president’s plan, either.

Mr. ROMNEY: Yes, that’s right, and that’s, in my view, the right course. He pulled out the public option. I think that was the right pullback. There’s no question in my mind that there’ll be an effort to try to stick it back in at some point, but early on, that was the most distinctive difference.

CONAN: All right. Daniel, thanks very much for the phone call, appreciate it.

DANIEL: Thanks for the answer.

CONAN: Bye-bye. Let’s go next to this is Ben(ph), Ben with us from Columbus.

BEN (Caller): Hello, thanks for having me on. Hello, Governor Romney. My question to you is that I just wanted to have you comment on about three weeks ago, we had a report released that said that the president’s, in his pet plan, increased economic activity here over the last year from one and a half to it’s probably about one and a half to three and a half percent. And just based on your comments at the convention, you said that he had failed in terms of help stimulating the economy, and I just wanted to hear your comments based on the report that we’ve seen that he did have some impact on the economy.

CONAN: And the convention, you mean the CPAC conference.

Mr. ROMNEY: Right.

BEN: (unintelligible).

CONAN: Go ahead.

Mr. ROMNEY: Yeah, and the answer is this, which is that when the president came to Congress and said look, this is an emergency measure, you need to pass this stimulus bill, it’s going to cost an extraordinary $787 billion, nothing of that scale ever passed that I know of in our congressional history.

He said look, if you pass this, we’ll be able to hold unemployment at eight percent. If you don’t, it’s going to go to 10 percent. And so they passed it, and it went to 10 percent.

Millions of additional Americans are out of work, lost their jobs even though that extraordinarily expensive bill was passed. Now our kids and grandkids will have to pay the interest and, ultimately, the principal back on this obligation. It’s an enormous burden, long-term for our economy. And in that regard, it failed.

Now at the same time, we all recognize that the American economy will turn back. If the president’s going to get the credit for the economy turning around, well, that’s a pretty easy job because, ultimately, the economy will turn around.

There’s nothing in America that suggests that a recession stays in on a permanent basis. The private sector reignites, inventories are rebuilt, and of course, throwing $787 billion out the window does have a stimulative effect. But it has not in any way been as successful as the president had promised or had hoped, and it’s not as effective as it could have been had it been targeted in a way to actually create immediate jobs rather than funding, in many cases, programs that will take a long time to pay out.

CONAN: Ben, thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it.

BEN: Thank you.

CONAN: I wanted to ask you about another thing you wrote in your book, Mitt Romney, and that is you warned against the temptations of populism. And again, this is something that can afflict both parties.

Mr. ROMNEY: You’re absolutely right, Neal. You know, when things are tough, as they are right now – and as I pointed out in my book, I’m concerned in particular over the next 10 and 20 years, and even longer, as to the course that America is on.

But in circumstances like this, people are apt – and we’re all in this boat -to see if there’s not somebody we can blame, whether it’s a politician or whether it’s Wall Street bankers or mortgage bankers – or mortgage brokers, that is – or immigrants, or some small group that can be scapegoated. And that’s done both on the left and on the right. And I’ve seen people in both parties who’ve probably succumb to that over the – over time. And we recognize that this scapegoating and demonizing of certain members of our society, that’s never built a great country. It’s never built a great economy.

We have to be honest about the real challenges we face and address them. It’s going to be hard work to overcome some of those challenges. But at times like this, there are no easy fixes by just targeting some small sub-segment of our society and somehow accusing them of being the cause of all our problems.

CONAN: In that clip we played from your address to the CPAC conference, you said that President Obama was not paying enough attention to American security. What’s wrong with his policy in Afghanistan?

Mr. ROMNEY: Well, let’s talk about piece by piece, Afghanistan first. I was pleased that the president made the decision to take action to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan. I think he made a couple of errors, even in doing so, that makes it a little more difficult – or potentially substantially more difficult for our troops to be successful there.

Number one, when the military came and said we need a minimum of 40,000 more troops, I would not have been inclined to cut that to 30,000. My inclination would be to give him at least 40 or maybe 50,000. Number two, I would not have announced the date we’re going to start pulling people out. I think that makes it more difficult at the time you’re just adding troops. And number three, one of the most essential ingredients for a successful counterinsurgency effort is for the people to believe in the credibility of their leadership.

And we were in the country at the time the elections for presidency were being held, and we did not do the job necessary to assure that those elections were seen as being fare and honest. And so President Karzai does not have the kind of universal support of his people that you would have hoped for in this kind of setting. So the – our troops have a much tougher job as result of those errors.

But more broadly, the president’s tour of apology, where he accused America of being dismissive and divisive and arrogant and having acted without the concern of others and even dictated to other nations, I think that has not encouraged other nations to draw closer to us. I think it’s kindled fires of anger against America in some corners.

The president said he was going to meet with Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, Chavez, Castro, all in his first year. His open hand has been met with a clenched fist. The – if you will, of the Kumbaya approach to foreign affairs in dealing with some these very repressive regimes has not borne fruit.

CONAN: We’re talking with Mitt Romney. His new book is, “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.” You’re listening to the Political Junkie on TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Ken?

RUDIN: Governor Romney, can I switch topics for one second and talk about the state of the Republican Party? When you were governor, you basically governed as a moderate-to-moderate-conservative governor. And when – and you were on stage when Scott Brown won that historic – I thought it was historic – victory on January 19th, and he also ran kind of a moderate – took a moderate conservative kind of campaign.

Now we see some – we see, you know, Tea Party activists going around the country. We saw at CPAC, where you won three last straw polls. Ron Paul won the straw poll. I’m not putting that much significance in straw polls, but do you see a shift – there’s a lot of anger in this country, and we’ve seen it festered in, you know, these protests, in these Tea Party protests. Do think the Republican Party is moving too far away from that centrist, Scott Brown kind of coalition?

Mr. ROMNEY: Well, I don’t know that I can characterize the party by any one individual. I do believe that the nation as a whole is a center-right nation, that it has not moved either to the left or to the right. But I think having watched this president, particularly in the area of spending and borrowing -you know, that’s been a topic Republicans talked about for decades without a lot of success. Most people don’t pay a lot of attention of that. Now they are.

They’ve seen that people that borrowed too much lost their homes, that businesses that borrowed lost their way and lost jobs. And they’re concerned about the trillion dollar deficits that are being racked up, that…

RUDIN: Which were also racked up during a Republican president, as well.

Mr. ROMNEY: Yes. I – both. And I say Washington and politicians, I’m referring to people Republican and Democrat. And so there’s a movement of independence, Republicans and Democrats, and I guess you’d call it a conservative movement, saying stop spending so much money. But I hope liberals feel the same way.

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Mr. ROMNEY: Don’t spend money we don’t have. And there’s a lot of energy around that. I think a lot of that will be captured in my party. Some will be captured in the Democratic Party, and candidates will come forward that are – that if you – are, if you will, spending and borrowing a hawks that will say no to that.

CONAN: Hmm.

Mr. ROMNEY: I think that’s a good thing. But I don’t believe that you’re going to see a dramatic shift in the nature of our respective parties.

CONAN: Let’s get one more caller in. Anna joins us from Iowa City.

ANNA (Caller): Hi. My comment/question is right in that vein. I consider myself conservative when it comes to political and fiscal matters. I’m married to a very conservative Republican doctor. However, I’m very frightened by the tradeoff in order to get Washington back on track. I’m going to have to vote for people who are going to take away my reproductive rights, who are going to impose – or continue to impose restrictions and who can marry in this country. And I was just wondering, you know, what Mr. Romney’s stance is on that tradeoff.

CONAN: And we’re going to him 45 seconds to answer you.

Mr. ROMNEY: Well, you know, the plus of having two parties – and basically two candidates – run for office is that we don’t have a highly fractured system where the most extreme vote can be the tiebreaker and where the country is required to bouts from guardrail to guardrail. The disadvantage of having only two parties is that the person that you vote for isn’t going to agree with you on 100 percent of the issues. And so you have to make that tough choice of who do I agree with most? And most likely, the Republican nominee will be a pro-life nominee who believes – as President Obama does, by the way – that marriage should be between a man and a woman. But, hopefully, you’ll line up with me and the Republican folks that I agree with and vote for conservatives like I will that’ll bring the kind of financial sanity that our nation needs.

CONAN: In just 23 month’s time, Anna.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. ROMNEY: Thanks, Anna.

ANNA: I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Thank you.

CONAN: All right. bye-bye.

Mr. ROMNEY: Thank you.

CONAN: And Governor Romney, thanks so much for being with us today.

Mr. ROMNEY: Thanks so much, Neal. Ken, good to be with you.

CONAN: The name of the book is “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.” You can read an excerpt at npr.org. Just click on TALK OF THE NATION. Ken Rudin, stay right there. There’s so much more left. This is NPR News.