Candidate Spotlight: Mitt Romney

As we've said - we are going to begin to highlight each Republican Presidential candidate. We've decided the best way to go about this is by using You Tube and MSNBC. We'll take what we believe is the best clip that introduces the candidates from You Tube, then copy and paste five issues from MSNBC's interactive Candidate Rating Matrix, and their sources. The issues that will be covered are: the economy, energy, health care, immigration, and the Iraq War.

First up: Governor Mitt Romney
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The Economy
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This is, indeed, a time of extraordinary challenges in this country, and the overspending in Washington and the overpromises that we've made are certainly among those challenges. But this is not a time for us to wring our hands and think that the future is bleak. In fact, the future is bright. We need leadership to rein in excessive spending, and to help America grow. The best answer for our economic woes is to make sure we have good jobs for our citizens, good schools for our kids, good health care for everyone, and that we have policies that promote the growth of the nation. We can have a level playing field around the world, get ourselves off of foreign oil, reduce the excessive spending in Washington, and have a bright future for our kids. This is based upon the strength of the American people. If you want to see a strong America, you don't look to Washington; you look to ways to strengthen the American people.

Energy
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o remain the economic and military superpower, America must address achieving energy independence. We must become independent from foreign sources of oil. This will mean a combination of efforts related to conservation and efficiency measures, developing alternative sources of energy like biodiesel, ethanol, nuclear, and coal gasification, and finding more domestic sources of oil such as in ANWR or the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS).

Health Care
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It doesn't make sense to have 45 million people without insurance. It's not good for them because they don't get good preventative care and disease management. But it's not good for the rest of the citizens either, because if people aren't insured, they go to the emergency room for their care when they get very sick. That's expensive. They don't have any insurance to cover it. So guess who pays? Everybody else. So it's not good for the people that aren't insured. We have to have our citizens insured, and we're not going to do that by tax exemptions, because the people that don't have insurance aren't paying taxes. What you have to do is what we did in Massachusetts. Is it perfect? No. But we say, let's rely on personal responsibility, help people buy their own private insurance, get our citizens insured, not with a government takeover, not with new taxes needed, but instead with a free-market based system that gets all of our citizens in the system. No more free rides. It works.
**Note, Romney's Health Care plan has been deemed "virtually identical" by On The Issues, one of two major sources used by MSNBC

Immigration
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Romney says current law discourages legal immigration of professionals while giving the unskilled a free pass. Romney proposes biometric documentation, employment verification of legal status and enforcement action against illegal immigrants already in this country.

The War in Iraq
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"This is not just about strategy & allies. It's not about oil. It's not about just the economy. It's not just about standing up for the fact that we've been there for a long time. It's about human lives. What we're doing in Iraq relates to protecting the lives of American citizens, here, around the world. It relates to lives throughout the world. It relates to dignity & freedom. We're in Iraq because we want to make sure that Iraq does not become what Afghanistan was under the Taliban: a place that they could recruit and train and launch attacks against us on 9/11, and other attacks throughout the world. The last thing America could stand for would be to have Iraq become an Afghanistan. Fortunately, the surge is working. It's going to keep that from happening. We're going to have stability and security there and American lives will be saved by virtue of the extraordinary sacrifice of American servicemen."