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Over at Health Care for All’s blog, John McDonough gripes about Mitt Romney’s policy approach:

I’m old fashioned — and I long for the days when gubernatorial initiatives were accompanied by legislation and detailed policy briefs that spelled out assumptions, numbers, and details. This governor accompanies his pronouncements with zero details, making it impossible to evaluate. So the Gov. says we’re spending about $947 million now for care for the uninsured, and his plan will spend — voila — $947 million. Believable? Who knows because the Administration keeps its numbers to itself.

I agree, especially as .08 Acres points out, the devil really is in the details on this one; mandating insurance coverage means one thing if people are getting comprehensive coverage, another if the less-well-off are being forced to pay for substandard policies with high deductibles and co-payments.

Clearly Romney is taking a page from Bush’s playbook — just watch how the administration continually touts a Social Security reform plan without actually submitting specifics — and it’s a trend toward press-release, photo-op policymaking that I find deplorable. But in fairness, in this instance, Romney doesn’t have much incentive to offer a plan to public scrutiny. I may have missed something, but has there been any policy brief coming from the corner office — whether it’s spelled out assumptions and details or not — that the Legislature has taken up in a serious fashion? The Republican minority is too beleaguered even to introduce a gubernatorial-driven legislative initiative.

Instead, Romney has discovered that his power comes not through his influence on Massachusetts policy, but rather through mobilizing political pressure through press gambits. And he does have a knack for co-opting progressive initiatives, much like he did in taking Robert Reich’s proposal to combine the Turnpike and the DOT. It almost doesn’t matter for him that the initiatives fail in the Legislature — he gets to look like the one with bold, reform ideas, and the left branch of the Democrats no longer can get traction on their goals. With health care, for instance, the road to employer-based mandatory health insurance may be harder.

I don’t sense that the situation will improve while Massachusetts has a weak governorship. And I don’t expect changes in governance anytime soon — if the debacle of the Big Dig didn’t mobilize people behind a strengthened executive branch, perhaps nothing will.