Public attacks against Obamacare jeopardize prospects of Romney, who pioneered similar plan

As the public outcry against Obamacare proceeds, Mitt Romney's chances of capturing the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 are going aglimmering.

Perhaps that was the reason President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats pushed the health care reform so vigorously and quickly. They not only have accomplished their top legislative objective, but also have hobbled the man who was potentially their most dangerous challenger.

In any case, the Republicans are now in a box. Romney appears to be a frontrunner for the nomination, but Republican leaders, elected officials and voters are in full-throated outcry against an Obama health care reform that bears strong similarities to the one Romney initiated as governor of Massachusetts.

This complicates matters. If the Republicans nominate Romney in 2012, they open themselves to criticism that their attacks against Obamacare were phony. If they reject Romney to duck the hypocrisy charge, they may have passed up their best chance to beat Obama.

Romney is, after all, a very successful investor who grew rich and famous by rescuing things of value from the boneyards of corporate America, while also rescuing the flailing Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Unless the Obama administration changes course, that is precisely the kind of leader the United States will need after the current wrecking crew leaves Washington.

The irony is that, in requiring all Massachusetts residents to have health insurance, the state's political class was hoping to provide a model for the rest of the country. At the time, the state's businesses were paying approximately $1 billion a year to subsidize the health care costs of the uninsured.

When the bipartisan health care measure was enacted, with almost unanimous legislative support, in 2006, Massachusetts House Speaker Sal DiMasi compared it to the Mayflower Compact that the pilgrims wrote after they landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620.

That was then. This is now.

What are the odds that the Republicans will nominate Romney if that would rob them of the issue that has riled much of the country and may still be hot two years from now?