Quote of the Day
Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.
Robert Frost
Romney: A Preseason Appraisal
It seems so obvious, but the media conservatives (e.g., Limbaugh, Levin and Hannity) seem to be missing the point: why did the the Democrats (including Robert Gibbs) last Sunday concentrate their heavy fire on Romney, now Gingrich has the momentum with a double-digit lead nationwide among prospective Republican voters with a strong lead in Iowa and lopsided leads in two Southern states, South Carolina and Florida, near his Georgia stronghold? The answer is: the Dems wants to face GINGRICH in the general election. They want to give Gingrich all the help he needs (whether he wants or needs it), show him how to market the Romney "finger-in-the-wind"/flip-flop critique. (No doubt the Democrats are scared to death running against a career politician and lobbyist whom has almost no support from his former (and current) Congressional colleagues, a family values conservative in his third marriage, someone whom was rebuked by a bipartisan House vote on ethics charges and a number of flip-flops of his own, starting with the GSE's and, of course, the unconstitutional health care insurance mandate, even more so than Romney.)
(Never mind that President behind the curtain--the one whom made promises about Gitmo, the Bush tax cuts, military tribunals, rendition, the Nobel Peace Prize winner's involvement in recent Libyan war operations (without Congressional approval), his reversal over the east European missile defense system, etc.: poor Nile Gardener had a hard time narrowing Obama's flip-flops down to a top 10--I threw in the tax cuts, but I could have also mentioned things like his initial campaign opposition to a health care insurance mandate, his opposition to Congressional earmarks, his opposition to auto company bankruptcies, etc. Everyone knows, of course, flip-flops before one becomes President are more important than flip-flops made while one is President...)
You would think most Republicans and media conservatives would rally behind the White House and other Dems on the attack against Mitt Romney. Regarding Mark Levin's departure from reality, griping why other media conservatives don't join his groupthink anti-Romney campaign, as I pointed out in yesterday's commentary: where has Levin been while the fickle "hot conservative" vote has been shifting almost overnight to Bachmann to Perry to Cain to Gingrich?
The Romney campaign has been incompetently run to date, not in terms of the general campaign approach, but the GOP race to the nomination. First, he should be running a change election and an anti-Washington campaign; Gingrich can't run as an outsider. Second, he has to know the voter base; the partisans want to hear passion and conviction, they want to know in tangible terms why they should vote him into office, and they don't want a nuanced, complicated message. Let me give an example: on the position of immigration, what Romney should not be focusing on apologetics of past policy statements. He should be talking how lax and arbitrarily enforced federal policy results in a higher state cost burden and/or risks to individual lives and property, catch-and-release policies, sanctuary cities, etc. (I made similar suggestions to the Rick Perry campaign in an earlier commentary.) Third, Romney should confront past position shifts directly and honestly. Don't issue implausible denials (e.g., past statements of RomneyCare), but provide the context for changing one's mind or position. For example, certain things that may have been feasible when the national debt was much lower are no longer feasible, especially when you consider a higher percentage of people in Massachusetts held insurance prior to the reform. Fourth, Romney needs to find ways of differentiating his message from Gingrich and/or Obama. For example, Romney should turn the tables on Obama by showing how Obama has carried on Bush's policies and mistakes, including massive deficit spending, unsustainable entitlement expansion, growing military interventionism, and market intervention. (Nothing on earth will irritate Obama more than being tied to Bush!) There are other ways to approach this, e.g., point out that, unlike Obama, he would not snub the findings of a bipartisan policy committee, like Obama threw Simpson and Bowles under the bus. If I was Romney, I would look at Ron Paul's distinctive messages (attacking the Fed's easy money policies, making real budget cuts now, and scaling back our global footprint). Finally, Romney needs to talk in concrete terms about his managerial ability and his business/economics knowledge and experience, what he saw as a venture capitalist that enables meaningful budget control and rebuilding a sounder economy.
On the more critical side, I do not like the way that Romney has seemed to declare almost 80% of the federal budget (entitlements and national defense) as all but untouchable: when we are not paying 40 cents on the federal dollar, and a sluggish global economy makes it all but impossible of growing the economy into a balanced budget, we have to talk about managing people's expectations of what the government will do for them. We have to get away from playing games with planned budget increases and start talking about cutting the federal payroll, narrowing program eligibility, selling national assets, consolidating operations, capping and means-testing disbursements, etc.
On Romneycare: I agree with Matt Welch: Romney has a lying problem on RomneyCare: Romney is saying that his solution worked in Massachusetts because of special circumstances, but it's different than the nationally-administered ObamaCare problem. The problem is, Romney publicly bought into Democratic concerns about 45M uninsured nationally and needing to do something like what he did in Massachusetts, to ensure people aren't unduly using expensive emergency care, they are getting preventive treatment, etc.; he talked about mandates to ensure nobody freeloaded on the system. So the problem is: how does he deal with unnecessary emergency room access nationwide, how does he deal with the preventive health care and freeloader problems nationwide without some comprehensive federal system, an extreme variation of what is ObamaCare, an infeasible federal extension of RomneyCare-like principles?
(HINT: the lesser evil is to shore up EXISTING state solutions and not to propagate an infeasible solution across states. For example, Romney could repackage his innovative approach to turning hospital reimbursements from the state into policyholder subsidies: what if we eliminate the tax-exempt status of employer-supplied health care, a contributing factor to rampant health care inflation, and say use the proceeds to reinsure catastrophic care? I say a "lesser evil" because I think states also are contributors to inflation by restricting competition from out-of-state insurers and mandating high-cost benefits.)
I think Romney needs to ackowledge government has been the problem, not the solution (with unfair distribution of implicit tax subsidies for employer-supplied insurance), and he needs to distance himself from crony capitalistic connections. We need to talk about special interests and gold-plated insurance policies and provider capacity constraints. We could talk about things like reinsuring and cost-sharing of state-administered assigned risk pools, penalties for system freeloaders, and providing interstate competition of basic health insurance policies. But as I described above, ObamaCare is simply unsustainable in its emerging form. It's one thing to eat out for lunch when you're earning a good income, but in times of economic stress, one has to economize (maybe brown-bag it). Romney needs to acknowledge some of the problems in Massachusetts' health care system and note a lessons learned; as long as he largely parallels Democratic talking points, he makes the case for ObamaCare; it's not enough to say doing it in Massachusetts is one thing, doing it elsewhere is entirely different. It comes across as an arbitrary distinction.
Are the Democrats Seizing the Higher Ground?
The conventional talking point is that the Congressional Republicans find themselves boxed in with their own rhetoric about paying for tax cuts (including the payroll tax cut). Before going further, I am one of those whom have called for not renewing this past year's payroll tax holiday. The Dems think they have the upper hand by calling it a $1000 tax hike on the middle class. That's absolute nonsense; this past year's payroll tax holiday has been little more than a variation of a stimulus check in a different form; cessation of an ineffectual temporary tax break--like the Dems' infamous Cash for Clunkers program--is not a vice. Second, this is not any other stimulus check and it's not any ordinary tax. The payroll taxes are really mandatory contributions meant to underwrite future social security payments. A dollar not paid today is a dollar not available for future retirement pensions.
There are some ominous signs: the House Republicans have been unable to make a dent in the real budget, in large part to blowing some key sure-thing pickup Senate races last year (including Nevada and Delaware). A recent poll in Massachusetts showed Senator Brown behind in his reelection bid. More disturbing were recent NBC polls showing Obama (with only a 43% approval in the Gallup approval ratings) beating both Gingrich and Romney losing to Obama in red state South Carolina as well as Florida. The Democrats have succeeded in recruiting a popular replacement statewide Dem for the open North Dakota Senate race, once thought to be a gimme to the Republicans. I think the Republicans are continuing to lose the propaganda wars as the Democrats succeed in diverting attention from declining ratings on US Treasury debt, which in theory should raise interest rates accordingly, by featuring themselves as guardian of taxpayer benefits. The Democrats will do everything in their power to maximize the return of current beneficiaries in the Ponzi-like, insolvent entitlement programs, at the expense of future beneficiaries. I mean, is anyone really surprised that former NJ Governor Corzine, a Democrat whom was defeated in his reelection bid by Chris Christie, despite Obama's strong support, is at the center of the biggest financial industry scandal in the post-2008 era?
I think the Republicans need to wake up and suggest bold solutions. This idea that we can get to a balanced budget while taking more than 75% of the budget off limits for spending cuts is simply untenable. The GOP can reassure senior citizens all they want that their benefits are off limits, but it doesn't get them the senior citizen vote. It's time to be the grownup in the room. People know about unrest in places like Greece, France, England and elsewhere. The GOP needs to remind voters each and every day to election day 11 months from now, Obama and the Senate Dems are bringing us closer to a Greek economic quagmire, where 8% real cuts in the budget now will eventually be seen as a lost opportunity.
I can only hazard a guess that Romney has been hurt by high-profile Democratic machine attacks on him, not to mention some bad press over Romney's defensiveness in recent interviews (Bret Baier of Fox News) Romney needs to shift his tone to a more optimistic, constructive one and exude confidence in his ability to handle the challenge.
Musical Interlude: Nostalgic/Instrumental Christmas
Irish Tenors, "I Heard the Bells"
