AI
Thursday, April 05, 2012 1:51:17 AM
Romney Says Obama Hides His Agenda
Mitt Romney speaking on Wednesday to the Newspaper Association of America in Washington.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
Published: April 4, 2012
WASHINGTON — The day after his clean sweep of three Republican primaries, Mitt Romney attacked President Obama [ http://www.mittromney.com/news/press/2012/04/mitt-romney-delivers-remarks-newspaper-association-america ] on Wednesday for a “hide-and-seek campaign” that disguises his real intentions on the budget, foreign policy, energy and other policy touchstones.
Appearing before a group of journalists that had hosted the president on Tuesday, Mr. Romney began by recalling Mr. Obama’s recent comment to Russia’s leader, in a moment picked up by a live microphone, that his flexibility on foreign policy would increase after the election.
“That incident calls his candor into serious question,” Mr. Romney said, and he asked on what other issues Mr. Obama would disclose his plans only after re-election.
It was the latest indication that the president and the candidate most likely to be the Republican nominee — as Mr. Romney is seen, at least among Wednesday’s audience of journalists — are fully engaged in the high-stakes enterprise of defining each other in the most unfavorable terms, seven months before the November election.
That was Mr. Obama’s objective on Tuesday, when, as Mr. Romney strengthened his standing as the Republican front-runner, the president lashed out at him for supporting a Republican budget plan that Mr. Obama labeled “social Darwinism.” And Mr. Romney wasted no time in striking back, accusing the president of handing off to the Democratic leadership in Congress an economic program that he characterized as “a grab bag of pet projects,” and of lacking the courage to take on entitlement spending.
The courage of his convictions, Mr. Romney said, was what he shared with the Republican plan’s leading sponsor, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who campaigned at his side in Wisconsin, the tightest of the three contests he won on Tuesday.
Although Mr. Romney’s own proposals may differ in some detail from what the House Republicans just approved, he has made his support for the Ryan plan clear, to the delight of those in the Obama camp who are glad to campaign against it.
“Unlike President Obama, I have the courage to stand behind my plan and the leadership to enact it,” Mr. Romney asserted.
He said there was no better example of the president’s vacillation than on the question of federal spending, especially on Medicare [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html ] and other entitlement programs. “He has failed to enact or even propose a serious plan to solve the entitlement crisis,” he said.
Mr. Romney spoke before a gathering of newspaper editors and reporters in Washington, where Mr. Obama the previous day [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/obama-attacks-house-gop-budget.html ] castigated him for supporting the budget plan, approved last week by House Republicans without a single Democratic vote.
Taking a few questions, he said Mr. Obama’s remarks on Tuesday were full of “distortions and inaccuracies” too numerous to list. And as he did in his prepared remarks, which he followed scrupulously, he defended the House spending plan, saying Mr. Obama had relied on “straw men” to criticize its spending cuts.
Asked about the tit-for-tat speeches, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Obama’s remarks on Tuesday had been full of specifics — “a comprehensive, detailed, dare I say wonky exposition of his views of what our budget priorities ought to be and his views on why the Republican budget put forward by Chairman Ryan is not the right solution.”
All but attaching Mr. Romney’s name to it, Mr. Carney said that “the Ryan Republican budget would become the law of the land if someone else were to occupy the Oval Office next year and if Republicans continue to effectively control Congress.”
The ideas Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney have campaigned for are not “the idea of a rump faction of the Republican Party,” he said. “This is what now is mainstream Republican thinking.”
The Senate’s majority Democrats do not intend to pass any budget, relying instead on the outlines of last summer’s debt deal between Congress and the White House. If the Republican budget plan were ever to become law, Congressional committees would have to cut spending over the next 10 years by a total of $5.3 trillion below what Mr. Obama seeks.
It also would order House committees to draft cuts in projected deficits worth $261 billion in order to head off automatic cuts to the military that would otherwise take place next year in the absence of a broad deficit reduction plan, which Congress was unable to agree upon last year.
Politically, the Ryan approach would require making some unpopular choices in an election year. The Republican argument, which Mr. Romney echoes, is that the alternative is an irresponsible bleeding of the nation’s already debt-laden balance sheet.
The Ryan plan seeks to rein in debt largely through changes in entitlement and discretionary spending rather than through increases in tax rates, which it would reduce while eliminating many tax loopholes.
According to the Congressional Budget Office [ http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43113 ], Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for revenues to rise to 19 percent of G.D.P. in 2030 from 15.5 percent in 2011, while spending on Medicare would rise to 4.25 percent from 3.25 percent, and Social Security [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_security_us/index.html ] to 6 percent from 4.75 percent. Medicaid [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html ] and the Children’s Health Insurance Program [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/state_childrens_health_insurance_program_schip/index.html ] would drop to 1.25 percent from 2 percent over the two decades. But the cuts in other spending programs would be much steeper — to less than 6 percent of G.D.P. from more than 12 percent, and even less another 20 years into the future.
These long term effects were based on the projections provided by Mr. Ryan and his staff, the budget office noted; its own nonpartisan staff “has not considered whether the specified paths are consistent with the policy proposals” contained in the legislation the Republicans pushed through the House.
*
Related
Obama, in Talk, Calls House G.O.P. Budget the Work of Rightist Radicals (April 4, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/obama-attacks-house-gop-budget.html
Taking 3 States, Romney Looks Beyond G.O.P. Foes to Obama (April 4, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/maryland-wisconsin-washington-primaries.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/us/politics/romney-says-obama-is-hiding-his-true-policy-aims.html
===
Romney takes a page from the Karl Rove playbook
The Rachel Maddow Show [video]
April 4, 2012
Wayne Slater, senior political writer and columnist for the Dallas Morning News, talks with Rachel Maddow about Mitt Romney's Karl Rove-ian strategy of accusing President Obama of being weak on the issues Romney is weak on, even when it doesn't make sense.
*
Links [ http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/04/11026723-links-for-the-44-trms ]:
As Romney and Ryan campaign across Wisconsin, ‘chemistry’ and talk of a ticket
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-romney-and-ryan-campaign-across-wisconsin-chemistry-and-talk-of-a-ticket/2012/04/04/gIQAB4sCvS_story.html
Document shows Romney's strategies
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/02/27/document_shows_romneys_strategies/?page=full
More than 200,000 jobs added in March: ADP
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-adp-employment-20120404,0,1103843.story
Indecision 2012 - President Evil 2
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-22-2012/indecision-2012---president-evil-2
Risk-Averse Romney
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/risk-averse-romney_634427.html [below]
'The Road We've Traveled' With Obama
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577295601147645884.html
*
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/46959410#46959410
===
Risk-Averse Romney
The candidate attempts to reassure conservatives.
By STEPHEN F. HAYES
Apr 2, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 28
Mitt Romney wants to eliminate government programs and shutter cabinet agencies. Doing so, he says, is “the critical thing” that needs to be done in order to bring government books back into balance and to begin restoring the promise of America. “Actually eliminating programs is the most important way to keep Congress from stuffing the money back into them,” he told me in a 30-minute interview on March 21. It’s a smart answer and a deeply conservative one.
But Romney, ever cautious, is reluctant to get specific about the programs he would like to kill. He did this in his bid for the Senate 18 years ago and remembers the political ramifications.
“One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” Romney recalled. “So I think it’s important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies. So for instance, I anticipate that housing vouchers will be turned over to the states rather than be administered at the federal level, and so at this point I think of the programs to be eliminated or to be returned to the states, and we’ll see what consolidation opportunities exist as a result of those program eliminations. So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.”
Romney’s answer goes a long way to explain why some conservatives have been reluctant to embrace his candidacy. They want a list. They want it to be long, they want it to be detailed, and they want a candidate who is not only willing to provide one but eager to campaign on it. This is especially true after the historic success of the unapologetic, aggressive strain of conservatism that triumphed in the 2010 midterm elections.
That’s not Mitt Romney. It never will be.
In a conversation with him, you can feel him thinking about his words, trying to make sure he doesn’t say anything that could become the latest in a string of gaffes—some real, some manufactured—that have dogged his campaign. His inveterate risk-aversion often comes off as a lack of commitment to conservative policies and goals, a perception that confounds his advisers, who say that Romney, in the spirit of the turnaround campaigns that marked his career in the private sector, is dedicated to profound, even radical, changes in what the federal government does and how it operates.
Thus far, their assurances haven’t been enough. Exit polls in primaries show Romney has difficulty earning support from voters who identify themselves as “very conservative,” usually winning just one out of three voters in that group. If he’d been able to win a majority of those voters, he would have been the de facto nominee weeks ago. But their resistance continues. Even in his decisive victory in Illinois, he won just 36 percent of self-identified “very conservative” voters. I asked him why.
“You know, I don’t know that I’m the pundit that can make that analysis for you,” he says with the laugh that often accompanies his answers to difficult questions. “I describe what my positions are on issues and lay out my policy and people will either warm to it or not, depending upon how they connect with it. So as to all of the factors that are associated with those that support me and those that support me less—well, I’m going to let you do that work.”
After I told him that I wasn’t sure I’d done that analysis well, he offered something of an answer.
“Obviously there are some for whom coming from Massachusetts is an issue,” he theorizes. “There are some—the health care plan in Massachusetts they can’t get over. There are others for whom religion is an issue. You’ll have to do the cross-tabs on a lot of things to figure out where that is, but one thing I can assure you is that the one group that will certainly be with me in the general election if I’m the nominee will be conservatives and very conservatives. Because they’re certainly not going to vote for Barack Obama.”
Romney had given a similar answer to Megyn Kelly in an interview on Fox News. Conservatives grumbled that his answer suggested his campaign was taking them for granted. Even in a Romney-Obama general election contest, the choice for potential voters isn’t binary. Republicans unenthusiastic about the nominee could stay home. According to exit polls, some 4 million fewer Republicans voted in 2008 than had turned out four years earlier. And polls suggest that enthusiasm for the Republican frontrunner this time is lower than it was at a similar point in the 2008 contest.
Nonetheless, a repeat of those turnout woes seems unlikely, in part because the Barack Obama on the ballot won’t be an abstraction—a candidate who ran as a post-partisan leader vowing to end the wars and economic uncertainty that seemed to exhaust Americans at the end of the Bush administration. He is, instead, a president with a record, a man who has added more debt in three years than his predecessor added in eight and whose two signature domestic policy achievements—the stimulus and Obamacare—are so unpopular that Democrats avoid using the terms. The list of his foreign policy and national security accomplishments doesn’t go far beyond authorizing the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
Still, for Romney to take conservatives for granted would be “political malpractice,” according to a highly regarded Republican strategist not affiliated with any presidential campaign. “An animating feature of the explosive growth of the Tea Party was due to their being dismissed (even before they were dissed and demeaned) as an insignificant voice.”
Romney hasn’t ignored this part of the Republican base. He has appeared at Tea Party events, he is a regular on conservative talk radio, and he has courted their leaders.
Last Thursday Romney reached out to the de facto leader of that group on a trip to Washington. Senator Jim DeMint, who vowed not to endorse in the Republican presidential primary, came awfully close in comments to reporters after that meeting.
“I can tell conservatives from my perspective that, I’m not only comfortable with Romney, I’m excited about the possibility of him possibly being our nominee,” he said.
The following day, Senator Pat Toomey, a DeMint ally and former head of the Club for Growth, also praised Romney. “I think Mitt Romney is a conservative, and I think if elected he’ll govern as a conservative.” That, of course, is the big question. To have a movement conservative like Toomey offer that kind of backing is no small thing.
Toomey added: “I think Governor Romney is absolutely committed to the principles of limited government. I think he knows the free enterprise system is a source of prosperity, and opportunity, and personal fulfillment, and elevating people out of poverty.”
Toomey will not endorse, but his words echo those Romney uses on his own behalf. “I have a number of liberal folks I’ve met with, and I listen to them and I think, ‘How can you be so clueless? How do you not understand that free enterprise is the only economic strategy which has ever lifted people out of poverty and provided long-term prosperity? And you continue to try and find ways to attack free enterprise?’ I simply don’t understand it.”
The president is one of those liberals. Romney’s critique of Obama is often focused on competence more than ideology. “He’s a nice guy, but he’s in over his head,” Romney often says.
Why not say more about ideology? Romney says the two critiques are mutually reinforcing.
Obama, he says, has an “agenda which is contrary to the interests of the economy and the nation. And I think a lot of people who have that agenda are clueless.”
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
© Copyright 2012 The Weekly Standard LLC (emphasis added)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/risk-averse-romney_634427.html [ http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/risk-averse-romney_634427.html?nopager=1 ]
===
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Mitt Romney speaking on Wednesday to the Newspaper Association of America in Washington.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
Published: April 4, 2012
WASHINGTON — The day after his clean sweep of three Republican primaries, Mitt Romney attacked President Obama [ http://www.mittromney.com/news/press/2012/04/mitt-romney-delivers-remarks-newspaper-association-america ] on Wednesday for a “hide-and-seek campaign” that disguises his real intentions on the budget, foreign policy, energy and other policy touchstones.
Appearing before a group of journalists that had hosted the president on Tuesday, Mr. Romney began by recalling Mr. Obama’s recent comment to Russia’s leader, in a moment picked up by a live microphone, that his flexibility on foreign policy would increase after the election.
“That incident calls his candor into serious question,” Mr. Romney said, and he asked on what other issues Mr. Obama would disclose his plans only after re-election.
It was the latest indication that the president and the candidate most likely to be the Republican nominee — as Mr. Romney is seen, at least among Wednesday’s audience of journalists — are fully engaged in the high-stakes enterprise of defining each other in the most unfavorable terms, seven months before the November election.
That was Mr. Obama’s objective on Tuesday, when, as Mr. Romney strengthened his standing as the Republican front-runner, the president lashed out at him for supporting a Republican budget plan that Mr. Obama labeled “social Darwinism.” And Mr. Romney wasted no time in striking back, accusing the president of handing off to the Democratic leadership in Congress an economic program that he characterized as “a grab bag of pet projects,” and of lacking the courage to take on entitlement spending.
The courage of his convictions, Mr. Romney said, was what he shared with the Republican plan’s leading sponsor, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who campaigned at his side in Wisconsin, the tightest of the three contests he won on Tuesday.
Although Mr. Romney’s own proposals may differ in some detail from what the House Republicans just approved, he has made his support for the Ryan plan clear, to the delight of those in the Obama camp who are glad to campaign against it.
“Unlike President Obama, I have the courage to stand behind my plan and the leadership to enact it,” Mr. Romney asserted.
He said there was no better example of the president’s vacillation than on the question of federal spending, especially on Medicare [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html ] and other entitlement programs. “He has failed to enact or even propose a serious plan to solve the entitlement crisis,” he said.
Mr. Romney spoke before a gathering of newspaper editors and reporters in Washington, where Mr. Obama the previous day [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/obama-attacks-house-gop-budget.html ] castigated him for supporting the budget plan, approved last week by House Republicans without a single Democratic vote.
Taking a few questions, he said Mr. Obama’s remarks on Tuesday were full of “distortions and inaccuracies” too numerous to list. And as he did in his prepared remarks, which he followed scrupulously, he defended the House spending plan, saying Mr. Obama had relied on “straw men” to criticize its spending cuts.
Asked about the tit-for-tat speeches, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said that Mr. Obama’s remarks on Tuesday had been full of specifics — “a comprehensive, detailed, dare I say wonky exposition of his views of what our budget priorities ought to be and his views on why the Republican budget put forward by Chairman Ryan is not the right solution.”
All but attaching Mr. Romney’s name to it, Mr. Carney said that “the Ryan Republican budget would become the law of the land if someone else were to occupy the Oval Office next year and if Republicans continue to effectively control Congress.”
The ideas Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney have campaigned for are not “the idea of a rump faction of the Republican Party,” he said. “This is what now is mainstream Republican thinking.”
The Senate’s majority Democrats do not intend to pass any budget, relying instead on the outlines of last summer’s debt deal between Congress and the White House. If the Republican budget plan were ever to become law, Congressional committees would have to cut spending over the next 10 years by a total of $5.3 trillion below what Mr. Obama seeks.
It also would order House committees to draft cuts in projected deficits worth $261 billion in order to head off automatic cuts to the military that would otherwise take place next year in the absence of a broad deficit reduction plan, which Congress was unable to agree upon last year.
Politically, the Ryan approach would require making some unpopular choices in an election year. The Republican argument, which Mr. Romney echoes, is that the alternative is an irresponsible bleeding of the nation’s already debt-laden balance sheet.
The Ryan plan seeks to rein in debt largely through changes in entitlement and discretionary spending rather than through increases in tax rates, which it would reduce while eliminating many tax loopholes.
According to the Congressional Budget Office [ http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43113 ], Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for revenues to rise to 19 percent of G.D.P. in 2030 from 15.5 percent in 2011, while spending on Medicare would rise to 4.25 percent from 3.25 percent, and Social Security [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_security_us/index.html ] to 6 percent from 4.75 percent. Medicaid [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html ] and the Children’s Health Insurance Program [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/state_childrens_health_insurance_program_schip/index.html ] would drop to 1.25 percent from 2 percent over the two decades. But the cuts in other spending programs would be much steeper — to less than 6 percent of G.D.P. from more than 12 percent, and even less another 20 years into the future.
These long term effects were based on the projections provided by Mr. Ryan and his staff, the budget office noted; its own nonpartisan staff “has not considered whether the specified paths are consistent with the policy proposals” contained in the legislation the Republicans pushed through the House.
*
Related
Obama, in Talk, Calls House G.O.P. Budget the Work of Rightist Radicals (April 4, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/obama-attacks-house-gop-budget.html
Taking 3 States, Romney Looks Beyond G.O.P. Foes to Obama (April 4, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/maryland-wisconsin-washington-primaries.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/us/politics/romney-says-obama-is-hiding-his-true-policy-aims.html
===
Romney takes a page from the Karl Rove playbook
The Rachel Maddow Show [video]
April 4, 2012
Wayne Slater, senior political writer and columnist for the Dallas Morning News, talks with Rachel Maddow about Mitt Romney's Karl Rove-ian strategy of accusing President Obama of being weak on the issues Romney is weak on, even when it doesn't make sense.
*
Links [ http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/04/11026723-links-for-the-44-trms ]:
As Romney and Ryan campaign across Wisconsin, ‘chemistry’ and talk of a ticket
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-romney-and-ryan-campaign-across-wisconsin-chemistry-and-talk-of-a-ticket/2012/04/04/gIQAB4sCvS_story.html
Document shows Romney's strategies
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/02/27/document_shows_romneys_strategies/?page=full
More than 200,000 jobs added in March: ADP
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-adp-employment-20120404,0,1103843.story
Indecision 2012 - President Evil 2
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-22-2012/indecision-2012---president-evil-2
Risk-Averse Romney
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/risk-averse-romney_634427.html [below]
'The Road We've Traveled' With Obama
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304724404577295601147645884.html
*
© 2012 msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/46959410#46959410
===
Risk-Averse Romney
The candidate attempts to reassure conservatives.
By STEPHEN F. HAYES
Apr 2, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 28
Mitt Romney wants to eliminate government programs and shutter cabinet agencies. Doing so, he says, is “the critical thing” that needs to be done in order to bring government books back into balance and to begin restoring the promise of America. “Actually eliminating programs is the most important way to keep Congress from stuffing the money back into them,” he told me in a 30-minute interview on March 21. It’s a smart answer and a deeply conservative one.
But Romney, ever cautious, is reluctant to get specific about the programs he would like to kill. He did this in his bid for the Senate 18 years ago and remembers the political ramifications.
“One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” Romney recalled. “So I think it’s important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies. So for instance, I anticipate that housing vouchers will be turned over to the states rather than be administered at the federal level, and so at this point I think of the programs to be eliminated or to be returned to the states, and we’ll see what consolidation opportunities exist as a result of those program eliminations. So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.”
Romney’s answer goes a long way to explain why some conservatives have been reluctant to embrace his candidacy. They want a list. They want it to be long, they want it to be detailed, and they want a candidate who is not only willing to provide one but eager to campaign on it. This is especially true after the historic success of the unapologetic, aggressive strain of conservatism that triumphed in the 2010 midterm elections.
That’s not Mitt Romney. It never will be.
In a conversation with him, you can feel him thinking about his words, trying to make sure he doesn’t say anything that could become the latest in a string of gaffes—some real, some manufactured—that have dogged his campaign. His inveterate risk-aversion often comes off as a lack of commitment to conservative policies and goals, a perception that confounds his advisers, who say that Romney, in the spirit of the turnaround campaigns that marked his career in the private sector, is dedicated to profound, even radical, changes in what the federal government does and how it operates.
Thus far, their assurances haven’t been enough. Exit polls in primaries show Romney has difficulty earning support from voters who identify themselves as “very conservative,” usually winning just one out of three voters in that group. If he’d been able to win a majority of those voters, he would have been the de facto nominee weeks ago. But their resistance continues. Even in his decisive victory in Illinois, he won just 36 percent of self-identified “very conservative” voters. I asked him why.
“You know, I don’t know that I’m the pundit that can make that analysis for you,” he says with the laugh that often accompanies his answers to difficult questions. “I describe what my positions are on issues and lay out my policy and people will either warm to it or not, depending upon how they connect with it. So as to all of the factors that are associated with those that support me and those that support me less—well, I’m going to let you do that work.”
After I told him that I wasn’t sure I’d done that analysis well, he offered something of an answer.
“Obviously there are some for whom coming from Massachusetts is an issue,” he theorizes. “There are some—the health care plan in Massachusetts they can’t get over. There are others for whom religion is an issue. You’ll have to do the cross-tabs on a lot of things to figure out where that is, but one thing I can assure you is that the one group that will certainly be with me in the general election if I’m the nominee will be conservatives and very conservatives. Because they’re certainly not going to vote for Barack Obama.”
Romney had given a similar answer to Megyn Kelly in an interview on Fox News. Conservatives grumbled that his answer suggested his campaign was taking them for granted. Even in a Romney-Obama general election contest, the choice for potential voters isn’t binary. Republicans unenthusiastic about the nominee could stay home. According to exit polls, some 4 million fewer Republicans voted in 2008 than had turned out four years earlier. And polls suggest that enthusiasm for the Republican frontrunner this time is lower than it was at a similar point in the 2008 contest.
Nonetheless, a repeat of those turnout woes seems unlikely, in part because the Barack Obama on the ballot won’t be an abstraction—a candidate who ran as a post-partisan leader vowing to end the wars and economic uncertainty that seemed to exhaust Americans at the end of the Bush administration. He is, instead, a president with a record, a man who has added more debt in three years than his predecessor added in eight and whose two signature domestic policy achievements—the stimulus and Obamacare—are so unpopular that Democrats avoid using the terms. The list of his foreign policy and national security accomplishments doesn’t go far beyond authorizing the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.
Still, for Romney to take conservatives for granted would be “political malpractice,” according to a highly regarded Republican strategist not affiliated with any presidential campaign. “An animating feature of the explosive growth of the Tea Party was due to their being dismissed (even before they were dissed and demeaned) as an insignificant voice.”
Romney hasn’t ignored this part of the Republican base. He has appeared at Tea Party events, he is a regular on conservative talk radio, and he has courted their leaders.
Last Thursday Romney reached out to the de facto leader of that group on a trip to Washington. Senator Jim DeMint, who vowed not to endorse in the Republican presidential primary, came awfully close in comments to reporters after that meeting.
“I can tell conservatives from my perspective that, I’m not only comfortable with Romney, I’m excited about the possibility of him possibly being our nominee,” he said.
The following day, Senator Pat Toomey, a DeMint ally and former head of the Club for Growth, also praised Romney. “I think Mitt Romney is a conservative, and I think if elected he’ll govern as a conservative.” That, of course, is the big question. To have a movement conservative like Toomey offer that kind of backing is no small thing.
Toomey added: “I think Governor Romney is absolutely committed to the principles of limited government. I think he knows the free enterprise system is a source of prosperity, and opportunity, and personal fulfillment, and elevating people out of poverty.”
Toomey will not endorse, but his words echo those Romney uses on his own behalf. “I have a number of liberal folks I’ve met with, and I listen to them and I think, ‘How can you be so clueless? How do you not understand that free enterprise is the only economic strategy which has ever lifted people out of poverty and provided long-term prosperity? And you continue to try and find ways to attack free enterprise?’ I simply don’t understand it.”
The president is one of those liberals. Romney’s critique of Obama is often focused on competence more than ideology. “He’s a nice guy, but he’s in over his head,” Romney often says.
Why not say more about ideology? Romney says the two critiques are mutually reinforcing.
Obama, he says, has an “agenda which is contrary to the interests of the economy and the nation. And I think a lot of people who have that agenda are clueless.”
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
© Copyright 2012 The Weekly Standard LLC (emphasis added)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/risk-averse-romney_634427.html [ http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/risk-averse-romney_634427.html?nopager=1 ]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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