He has to choose between her and the conservatives he depends on if he wants to beat Obama.

Because touting Romneycare as a response to the Joe Soptic/Romney-Murdered-My-Wife ad doesn’t just signal that the Romney campaign takes conservative support for granted, it signals abject incompetence.

What are we talking about? This…

You can bet the Left and the media will have a field day with such a disastrously stupid statement.

A news flash for Miz Saul and/or whatever Romney staffer put her up to throwing out that poison pill – the people Mitt Romney is depending on for support to win this election aren’t interested in Romneycare. They’re interested in repealing Obamacare. They find it inconvenient, at minimum, that Romney is the candidate they’re depending on to get rid of Obamacare.

And they certainly don’t want to be reminded of the fact that Romneycare and Obamacare are pretty similar.

But the media will delight in reminding them of that, thanks to Andrea Saul opening her big fat mouth and taking the air out of the fact that the Obama campaign’s super PAC just put out the most scurrillous, dishonest ad in the history of American elections.

This isn’t defensible. You don’t win elections as a Republican by blurring the differences between you and the lefty the Democrats are running. We know this to be true, because the GOP has given us lots of examples to prove it. John McCain was a pretty good one. You also don’t win campaigns by wandering off message to blur those differences, like Saul just did.

Conservatives are 40 percent of the voting public, by far the largest ideological group in America. And conservatives don’t like government health care. They want to see the government find its way out of that business, not take over more of it. Romney’s record where this is concerned isn’t great. And Andrea Saul just reminded the 40 percent of the voters out there Romney needs on Election Day of why they weren’t crazy about Romney in the first place.

And that means Romney has to rebuild his reputation with conservatives all over again thanks to Andrea Saul. Real damage is being done.

If he understands this, and he’s intelligent enough to recognize it’s a problem, then he needs to dump Andrea Saul. The sooner the better. This afternoon is fine. Tomorrow morning? Not quite as good.