Tag Archives: Obama

Romney Should Use Tax Return Release to Make the Moral Case for Capitalism

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Much as it pains me to link to the outfit that threw the odious Keith Olbermann a lifeline when even MSNBC could no longer stomach him, Current.com has a useful roundup entitled “List of Republicans calling on Mitt to release returns keeps growing and growing.”

Author Jonathan Kuperberg starts with a lead nearly as snarky as mine on this post, then plays it straight while quoting Rick Perry, Bill Kristol, Haley Barbour, Bret Hume, Richard Lugar, Michael Steele and a dozen more conservatives (or Republicans) calling on Romney to release more tax returns.  George Will describes the perception Romney is creating:

“The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” Will said. “Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”

I suspect that when he inevitably releases them, the returns will establish that Romney is really, really, really rich.  Master of the Universe rich.  Maybe “Forbes 400” rich, although Forbes doesn’t currently think so.  In an op-ed titled “Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem,” Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute describes why Romney should not run from the fact of his wealth:

Mitt Romney’s résumé at Bain should be a slam dunk. He has been a successful capitalist, and capitalism is the best thing that has ever happened to the material condition of the human race. From the dawn of history until the 18th century, every society in the world was impoverished, with only the thinnest film of wealth on top. Then came capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere that capitalism subsequently took hold, national wealth began to increase and poverty began to fall. Everywhere that capitalism didn’t take hold, people remained impoverished. Everywhere that capitalism has been rejected since then, poverty has increased.

Capitalism has lifted the world out of poverty because it gives people a chance to get rich by creating value and reaping the rewards. Who better to be president of the greatest of all capitalist nations than a man who got rich by being a brilliant capitalist?

I suspect it also will turn out that Romney has aggressively made use of tax-minimization strategies that are not practical for people of lesser means.  Assuming everything he did was legal, I say good for him.  If Obama supporters want to claim that it is somehow immoral to take advantage of loopholes in the law for financial benefit, they should take a one-question quiz: Who is the first major presidential candidate ever to opt out of the system of public funding of campaigns, even while supporting that system on “principle”? Hint: he’s running again this year, and his name is not Romney.

Granted, any rich man traipsing through a defense of capitalism will encounter pitfalls, and Romney no doubt would blunder into some of them.  But this election is shaping up as the clearest choice in memory between the champions of free enterprise and the champions of bigger government, and Romney should make no apology for playing hard for the team to which he belongs.

 

Who Wins? Q&A on the Obamacare Ruling

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Which presidential candidate gets an electoral boost from the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision?

On balance, I think Obama gains a slight advantage — or at least, I think it would have been worse for him if his signature achievement had been overturned as unconstitutional.  The potential downside for Obama is that voting him out of office now becomes the only way to have any hope of overturning the legislation.  But how potent a factor will opposition to Obamacare really be?  It was pretty potent in the 2010 midterm elections, in the immediate wake of the outrageous shenanigans (remember “deem-and-pass” and the “Cornhusker Kickback“?) employed to pass a bill opposed by a majority of Americans without a single Republican vote in Congress.  Now, however, Obamacare has momentum on its side — hey, it’s constitutional!

What does the decision mean for the credibility and reputation of the Supreme Court?

It’s probably a net positive, at least in the long run.  Most people (including me) expected yet another 5-4 decision along ideological lines.  (The mother of all 5-4 decisions, of course, was Bush v. Gore, where many felt the split was nakedly political.)  Instead, the GOP-appointed Chief Justice joined the four liberal justices in upholding Obamacare.  I wish the decision had gone the other way, but conservatives can take some solace in the fact that Roberts’ ruling limits the expansion of the Commerce Clause.

Did Chief Justice Roberts make a political or an apolitical decision?

Depends on whom you ask, of course.  The Chief Justice’s ruling cited precedent requiring that “every reasonable construction must be resorted to, in order to save a statute from unconstitutionality.”  So one can argue that the ruling is the opposite of judicial activism, paying deference to the legislative and executive branches.  On the other hand, “Mr Roberts rather straightforwardly legislated from the bench by offering and affirming a construction of Obamacare which the administration itself rejected.”

Will Obamacare be reversed if the GOP wins big in November?

Yes.  It’s mathematically possible, but highly unlikely, that the Republicans will end up with a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.  But a simple majority may be enough, because under the Senate’s arcane “reconciliation” process, votes on tax matters require only 51 votes to pass.

And Obamacare, of course, is a tax.  The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court made it official.

Spiking the Football: Obama Tarnishes a Genuine Triumph Through Tone-Deaf Politicizing

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President Obama seems to be on the verge of turning the only positive accomplishment of his presidency into a campaign liability.

Veterans for a Strong America logoI don’t know what he and his campaign staff were thinking when they started saying and implying that Romney might not have given the go-ahead for the take-down of Osama bin Laden.   Do they really think Obama or any Democrat is going to win votes by claiming to be more hawkish than a Republican opponent?

The Veterans for a Strong America ad embedded above is just devastating.  The parallels with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004 are obvious — but James Taranto makes an important distinction (second item):

It sounds a bit like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who helped sink John Kerry. We’re not the first to make that connection. On Wednesday Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson wrote a defensive piece titled “Why Obama Can’t Be Swift-Boated”:

Kerry may have been Swift-Boated, but Obama is not going to be SEALed. Republicans are used to calling Democrats cowards and worse. Not this time. Republicans have the squishy, soft, cosseted, consensus-building candidate, while Democrats have the fighter. Finally.

Liberal pundits always make us laugh when they cheer on Democratic macho posturing like this. That said, it seems to us Carlson is probably right to think the SEALs won’t be able to hurt Obama nearly as much as the Swift Boat veterans hurt Kerry. After all, Kerry wasn’t really a war hero, whereas killing bin Laden is a real accomplishment for Obama, one that even his braggadocio cannot completely erase.

Allahpundit thinks the “spiking the football” dustup could actually end up helping Obama (hat tip: Contentions):

He’d much rather have an argument with conservatives over the OBL raid than the economy since every minute spent talking about Bin Laden is (a) a reminder that O did in fact give the order to liquidate the bastard, however shoddy his behavior might have been afterward, and (b) a minute not spent talking about the thoroughgoing crappiness of, oh, pretty much every other part of his record.

It’s not just conservatives going after Obama for celebrating in the end zone.  In the video, Arianna Huffington called the President’s politicizing of the matter “despicable.”  I actually think that overstates it — I just think it’s stupid and counter-productive. But I’m delighted by Huffington’s reaction — it provides a lot of protective cover for conservative criticism on the topic.

 

When Israel Attacks Iran, Will It Help Obama or Romney?

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One of Iran's nuclear facilities, near Qom

Three assumptions are implicit in the headline, and I feel pretty confident about all three.

Let’s start with the easy assumption: Romney will be the Republican nominee. I declared Romney the inevitable victor way back in January, and I see no reason to change my mind just because the underlying reality is having trouble keeping up with my insight.

Second assumption: Israel will attack Iran.  Here I’ve actually changed my mind since I wrote “Pace Bolton, I’m Betting Against an Israeli Air Strike on Iran’s Nuke Facilities” in July 2009.   Way back then, in the wake of Obama’s inexplicable tardiness in condemning the theocracy’s crackdown of what didn’t quite become the Second Iranian Revolution, America’s greatest former UN Ambassador said:

Iran’s nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.

Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. Israel is undoubtedly ratcheting forward its decision-making process. President Obama is almost certainly not.

That inexorability, which I didn’t buy back then, has had nearly three years to continue inexorabilizing.  Back then, Obama’s emerging lack of support for the Jewish state seemed to me to be the main non-logistical barrier to an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Obama still is not the world’s biggest fan of Israel, but his attitude toward Iran certainly has hardened.  In a long and thoughtful overview this week of the recent rhetoric, one of Meryl Yourish’s co-bloggers wrote:

Obama stated quite forcefully that he is not going to abide a situation where US will have to deal with containment of nuclear Iran. On the face of it, this is as clear-cut declaration of intentions as anyone would hope to get from a leader of the superpower.

Obama may not want an Israeli attack, he may still be trying to dissuade the Israelis from attacking, but it would be hard for him to take any action against Israel if it attacks.  And if you have any doubt that Israel has the guts to attack eventually, I commend to you Jeffrey Goldberg’s column this week, “Israelis Grow Confident Strike on Iran’s Nukes Can Work.”

The third headline assumption is a bit more subtle.  I’m assuming not just that the attack will happen, but also that it will happen before November 2012.  Once upon a time I might have thought that Israel would delay until 2013 in the hope of acting under a more supportive U.S. administration.  But there’s obviously no guarantee of a Republican victory, and a re-elected Obama who never has to campaign again might become even less sympathetic to Israel.

So what’s the answer to the headline query — will an Israeli attack on Iran help Obama or Romney?  Hell, I don’t know.

Tempting though it is to end the post there, I may as well share the few ideas I have on the matter.  Obviously, who it helps will be affected by what happens after the Israelis attack.  Iran’s Supreme Theocrat Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said yesterday:

“We do not have atomic weapons and we will not build one. But against an attack by enemies — to defend ourselves either against the U.S. or Zionist regime — we will attack them on the same level that they attack us.”

In Iran-speak, Israel is the Little Satan and America is the Big Satan. It would be suicidal for the Iranians to overtly attack American forces while launching a retaliation against Israel — but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.  Keep in mind that we’re dealing with a culture that glorifies martyrdom.

In wartime, Americans tend to rally around the president, at least initially.  More than two-thirds of Americans supported the beginning of George Bush’s war in Iraq. So unless Obama utterly abandons Israel in its time of greatest need, I tend to think an Israeli attack will favor Obama’s re-election.  Sure would take a lot of attention away from the economy and Obamacare.

Religious Liberty Clashes With Reproductive Rights in Contraceptive Mandate

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Whenever I write or talk about abortion and reproductive rights, I’m careful to describe each side with the term it has chosen for itself:  “pro-life” and “pro-choice”.  It’s a simple policy decision, really — any discussion of the appropriateness of either term quickly becomes tendentious, and people have a right to decide how to self-identify.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions about the terms people use.  “Anti-choice” and “anti-life” are argumentative metatags.  “Anti-abortion” seems descriptive and largely not provocative, although I understand the preference for being “pro” something.

Conversely, “pro-abortion” does seem provocative and inappropriate.  For years I told myself, nobody is really pro-abortion, but people like me believe a woman should have the right, at least under some circumstances, to decide whether to have an abortion.

I’ve been pro-choice my entire adult life, but I’ve never been entirely comfortable with it. Bill Clinton had it about right when he said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”  Abortion is a deeply personal, sometimes wrenching decision made on the threshold of life and death.  It’s much like the decision, at the other end of the timeline, on whether to remove the feeding tube or refrain from resuscitation. At both ends, I believe the choice should be made by the people who are most directly affected, and the rest of us should move along.

But there is, at the very least, something morally ambiguous about abortion, and it becomes more troubling the closer the fetus comes to viability.  I’m not particularly interested in debating when life begins — it’s enough to know that it does begin.  Barring miscarriage, disease or trauma, the fetus eventually becomes a baby.  If someone says “abortion is murder” I have no trouble ignoring them.  The slogan that clutches at my soul is “abortion stops a beating heart.”*

In recent years, it’s become clear I was mistaken in believing nobody is “pro-abortion.”  I was projecting my own values onto people who did not necessarily share them. I was utterly appalled when a prominent priest in my own Episcopal denomination proclaimed that “abortion is a blessing” — under every circumstance.

Think I may be exaggerating? Here’s the passage in question:

And when a woman becomes pregnant within a loving, supportive, respectful relationship; has every option open to her; decides she does not wish to bear a child; and has access to a safe, affordable abortion — there is not a tragedy in sight — only blessing. The ability to enjoy God’s good gift of sexuality without compromising one’s education, life’s work, or ability to put to use God’s gifts and call is simply blessing.

These are the two things I want you, please, to remember — abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Let me hear you say it: abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done. Abortion is a blessing and our work is not done.

Now that same mindset — the idea that reproductive rights are absolute and trump every other consideration — is at play in the current controversy over the Obama administrations mandate that Catholic organizations must cover contraception free of charge in their employee health plans.

Personally I think the Catholic Church’s opposition to all contraception — whether or not abortifacients are involved — is silly and misguided.  Most Catholics outside the hierarchy agree.  The 98% figure floated by the White House seems to be exaggerated, but it’s safe to say the overwhelming majority of sexual active Catholics use contraception if they don’t want to make a baby.

But nobody is talking about denying anyone access to contraception.  Any person with a job that includes healthcare coverage makes enough money to be able to afford some form of reliable birth control, even if the employee has to pay every dollar of the cost.  The debate is whether a Catholic organization should be forced to pay for a product or service that the church believes is immoral.

Despite Justice Douglas’s emanations from penumbras, the Bill of Rights doesn’t actually say anything about reproductive rights.  But it does say something, explicitly and forcefully, about religion.  Liberals and Democrats would be well-advised to be more deferential to religious liberty when one of the three people most likely to win the next presidential election is Rick Santorum.

* This isn’t literally true of very early-term abortions.  But fetal heartbeat begins as early as week six — well within the first-trimester threshold established by Roe v. Wade.

Who First Asked “Is Mitt Romney the Republican John Kerry?”

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Separated...

... at birth?

When I was in high school, one of my favorite gag lines was, “I’m a reformed Druid — we worship bushes.”  I thought this was hilarious.  More than that, after saying it enough times, I went through the next quarter century honestly believing I had made it up. (According to the spoilsport Internet, it dates at least back to a M*A*S*H episode in 1973 — a year I remember as “10th grade” — and probably to the whimsical founding of the Reformed Druids of North America in 1963.)

Some time ago I started talking about my concern that Mitt Romney might be the Republican equivalent of John Kerry.  Here’s how I described it in my December 12 endorsement of Romney:

The saying is, “you can’t beat somebody with nobody” — and any sitting president is a somebody.  Romney’s not exactly charismatic or inspirational, and the risk is that he becomes the Republican analog to John Kerry.  Lots of people voted against George Bush in 2004, but hardly anybody voted for Kerry.

I don’t remember hearing that analogy offered previously by anyone else, but I’m wary of claiming authorship.  A search for “Is Mitt Romney the Republican John Kerry?” — including the quotation marks in the search — yields more than 7,500 results.  But the vast majority of them turn out to be other sites referring to a post by that name on Daily Kos.  And the Kos reference is more than a full month later than mine.

The Kos post is by someone who hides behind the screen name Zackpunk, and as you would expect, it is highly tendentious:

Both Romney and Kerry have a political issue that makes them unpopular with their own base. For Kerry it was his vote for the war in Iraq (or the authorization for Bush to wage said war). Hardcore progressives were loathe to forgive him on that. Romney’s scarlet letter is the healthcare mandate he enacted as governor for Massachusetts. Trying to help the sick is an unforgivable offense for today’s GOP.

Really, Zackpunk? Do you really think Republican opposition to Obamacare is driven by animosity toward sick people?

But whatev, let’s turn our attention back to me.  Those 7,500 Google hits collapse down to a mere two screens of results, followed by “we have omitted some entries very similar to the 18 already displayed.” Of those 18, only one appears to predate the Kos reference.  It also predates mine: It’s from a group blog I had not previously encountered called Exchange Coffee House.  In a post titled “Is Mitt Romney the Republican’s John Kerry?“, Roland Hulme offered a much more balanced post than Zackpunk, adhering to the blogosphere’s typical inverse relationship between thoughtfulness and web traffic.

[P]oor old Mitt makes the worst possible candidate precisely because of the reason he’s been chosen – his mediocrity.

The GOP are planning to run a middle-of-the-road Republican based on nothing more substantial than the slogan: “He’s not Barack.” The problem is, Romney has a track record of so-called “statism” that rivals Obama’s own! …

For example, he invented the “Obamacare” health care reform that the Republicans now expect him to criticize and discredit. Romney’s political advisers even met with Obama to help draft the bill!

If Romney ultimately takes the candidacy for 2012, Obama will get his second term in office

The post is dated October 18, 2011, which trumps me by two months.  I think I first started talking about the analogy earlier than that, but I can’t prove it.  (Note to self: get off your fetish about research, just start posting stuff as it pops into your head.)

Hulme certainly has correctly identified Romney’s heaviest baggage.  “Romneycare” (a misnomer) makes it much more complicated to take advantage of the wildly unpopular Obamacare.  Complicated, but not impossible.  While Romney signed legislation with a constitutionally questionable individual mandate, the Massachusetts version was a bipartisan effort — not a single-party cramdown advanced in 1 a.m. votes and “deem and pass” maneuvers in a desperate race to get the bill signed before enough people realized just how bad it was.

The healthcare bill Romney signed is more of a liability in the GOP primary than it will be in the general election. And while Romney may be more of a “big-government Republican” than many conservatives would prefer, most of those conservatives will vote for him anyway, correctly reasoning that he’s well to the right of Obama.

I think Hulme is on shakier ground in saying Mitt’s “mediocrity” is the reason he’s been chosen.  (I’m posting this half an hour before the polls open in Florida, where I expect Romney’s inevitability to re-emerge.)  Romney, who can point to his background as a governor and a successful businessman, is bland, not mediocre.  That distinguishes him from Kerry, who was both.

Mitt & Mitch: Governor Daniels for Vice President!

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OK, the Pres has some political skills, and I loved the closing tribute to Seal Team 6.  Obama deserves his share of the credit for approving a risky mission, and he earned the right to a stirring build-up to “God bless the United States of America.”

Onward!  We learned four years ago that one of the greatest perils of running for president is the urge to try to hit a five-run homer when picking a running mate.  Whoever wins the election will have earned the right to finish in the top two, by winning the endorsement of one of our two major political parties.  But could there be a worse way to pick a vice president?  One person makes the decision in secrecy, and it’s virtually irreversible.

I was disappointed when Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana declined to run for president last year.  He might not have ended up being my favorite, but I thought he had potential.  The governor’s response to the the State of the Union address tonight has me ready right now to endorse him for VP.  I’m a sucker for a full-throated celebration of capitalism, and Daniels pitched a gem:

“Contrary to the President’s constant disparagement of people in business, it’s one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs – what a fitting name he had – created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew. Out here in Indiana, when a businessperson asks me what he can do for our state, I say ‘First, make money. Be successful. If you make a profit, you’ll have something left to hire someone else, and some to donate to the good causes we love.’

“The extremism that stifles the development of homegrown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands, or jacks up consumer utility bills for no improvement in either human health or world temperature, is a pro-poverty policy. It must be replaced by a passionate pro-growth approach that breaks all ties and calls all close ones in favor of private sector jobs that restore opportunity for all and generate the public revenues to pay our bills.

And here’s a tiger-whistle to fellow Princeton grads: Mitch Daniels ’71!

Sullivan’s Corporate Masters Stab Him in the Back on Newsweek’s Cover

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Why does Newsweek suck?Newsweek, a once-important news magazine now owned by a liberal blogging site, has a cover this week offering me the opportunity to let Andrew Sullivan, a once-independent blogger, explain to me why I am “dumb.”  Grateful though I am for Newsweek‘s efforts to improve the tenor of our national discourse, I’m going to pass.

I am, however, enough of a blogosphere junkie to be interested in how Sullivan’s six-person “personal” blog responds to the firestorm of criticism the cover has rightly received.  I also know from my own long-ago journalism days that authors almost never write their own headlines, and Sullivan confirms that’s true in this case.  Sullivan professes to be perplexed by the criticism:

None of these critics shows any sign of having read the actual article. Is it too much to ask that they rip me apart after thinking rather than before? It’s not a book, for Pete’s sake. It’s less than 3,000 words, and has strong criticism of the left in it. Maybe the headline, which I didn’t write, set them off.

Gee, ya think?

Sullivan, a former conservative, has a talent for outraging people with whom he once made common cause.  Nevertheless, he’s an extremely talented writer, and certainly is capable of thoughtful and nuanced argumentation.  He has to understand how offensive the cover headline is.  The headline of his own blog post announcing the cover — a headline that he did write, or at least controlled — is “Why Obama Should Be Reelected.”  The article itself, once you get past the disgraceful cover, is headlined “How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics.” I’m inclined to disagree with the premise, but if the article were positioned that way, I might actually want to read it.

Even though this is a case of an author being wronged by a headline writer, I’m not inclined to let Sullivan off the hook entirely.  Sullivan, a true pioneer of blogging as an independent medium, now appears so beholden to Tina Brown & Co. that he can’t even manage the mildest of complaints about the utterly inappropriate headline.

How do I know this?  His minions publish a “Daily Wrap” post each day cataloging the three dozen blog posts Sullivan writes or signs off on in an average day.  Here’s the overview of Sully’s posts about what the blog carefully calls “his Obama defense”:

Today on the Dish, Andrew called out Fox News for making him persona non grata – which potentially produced an on-air debate over the blockbuster Newsweek piece with Megyn Kelly – and defended his Obama defense here, here, and here.

Feel free to follow the links if you wish — Sullivan gave my humble blog an exciting traffic spike once back in the day, so I won’t begrudge him the traffic from my vast audience (hi Mom!) But I can tell you that I read all of the posts, and while he carefully avoids echoing the incendiary headline, there’s no hint of any criticism of it.

After years of snotty elite references to stupid right-wingers versus “the reality based community,” can’t Sullivan understand why conservatives might boycott an article that calls them “dumb” as an opening gambit?

But but but… the dumb people are not just conservatives!

Just browsing at a few of the right-wing blogs, I see that they have attacked it without actually, you know, reading it… Half the article is devoted to liberals and Democrats!

In a previous incarnation at the Atlantic magazine, Sullivan’s blog proudly proclaimed that it was “of no party or clique.”  But he has become so indoctrinated into the cult of Obama that he defends The One against all comers, from the right or the left.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, I’m criticizing your article without reading it.  I’m pretty comfortable with that decision. If some ink-stained clown put a gratuitous racial slur in a headline over my criticism of presidential policies, I wouldn’t expect to win many converts with that post.

Announcing A.T.I.N.’s Much-Coveted Endorsement: Romney for President

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Months ago it became clear that I was not going to fall in love with anybody in the Republican field.  Ronald Reagan wasn’t coming back.

Chris Christie produces echoes of the Great Communicator, but he never had any intention of running.

I tried to generate some enthusiasm for Tim Pawlenty, but I didn’t work hard at it because he showed no signs of getting any traction.

When Rick Perry belatedly got into the race, I took a hard look at him.  Too much of a social conservative for my taste, but that would help him with part of the Republican base, and I liked the fact that he had governed a very large state.  But he started chewing on his toes almost immediately, and ultimately it seemed almost like he didn’t even want the job.

I was sorry to see Herman Cain flame out, but I sure didn’t want him to get the nomination.  He would have complicated the Left’s phony “racism” gambit, but he clearly had given very little thought to foreign affairs — the most important arena for any president.

When Newt Gingrich debuted as the not-Romney flavor of the week, I was surprised — I thought his campaign blew up months ago.  (Or maybe years ago.)  I figured he would fade quickly, but he’s already held on at the head of the polls longer than I expected — and the Iowa caucuses are only three weeks away.

As one prominent Republican after another steps forward to remind us that Gingrich is a hothead, Ross Douthat explains why the former Speaker’s vaunted debating skills hold little promise of overcoming President Obama’s incumbancy advantage:

Gingrich might debate circles around Obama. He might implode spectacularly, making a hot mess of himself while the president keeps his famous cool. But either way, setting up a grand rhetorical showdown seems unlikely to supply a disillusioned country with what it’s looking for from Republicans in 2012.

Conservatives may want catharsis, but the rest of the public seems to mainly want reassurance. They already know Barack Obama isn’t the messiah he was once cracked up to be. What they don’t know is whether they can trust anyone else to do better.

Last year, when the President and his party were foisting Obamacare on an unwilling public, the conventional wisdom was that Romney couldn’t possibly win the Republican nomination because he had implemented something similar in Massachusetts.  That made sense to me, and Romneycare is part of the reason Republicans have been flirting with one not-Romney after another for months.

But if Romney wins the nomination, I think he’ll be able to differentiate himself from Obama on healthcare pretty easily. It’s one thing to launch an experiment in a single state with broad bipartisan support.  It’s quite another to annex one-sixth of the nation’s economy without a single Republican vote in either house of Congress.

The other Republican complaint about Romney is that he isn’t conservative enough. But that also means he has a better chance of defeating Obama in a center-right nation.

Is America ready for a president who adheres to a faith that is only slightly older and slightly more reputable than Scientology?  Only time will tell, but there are 15 Mormons currently in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and I don’t think the Democrats should bank on the religion issue.

The saying is, “you can’t beat somebody with nobody” — and any sitting president is a somebody.  Romney’s not exactly charismatic or inspirational, and the risk is that he becomes the Republican analog to John Kerry.  Lots of people voted against George Bush in 2004, but hardly anybody voted for Kerry.

But Romney has a strong record of executive leadership, both in business and government.  It’s his second trip through the crucible of a presidential campaign, so there presumably are no skeletons left in the closet.  He has the best chance of beating Obama, and the country literally can’t afford four more years of this administration.

Ever since I realized that Michele Bachmann had no chance, I’ve told people that I’ll be voting for “whichever flawed candidate the Republicans nominate.”  Today I’m endorsing the flawed candidacy of Mitt Romney.

GOP Needs to Do More to Counter the “Tax Breaks for the Rich” Mantra

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I’m not a “no-new-taxes” absolutist. I don’t share the “draw-the-line-HERE” militancy of the Taxed Enough Already Party, but I respect it, and I hope the Tea Party serves to tug the nation toward smaller government.  But we are in a deep enough hole — a hole dug with great enthusiasm over the years by both Democrats and Republicans — that any effective course correction will have to include both tax revenue and spending cuts.

This is a matter of pragmatism more than principle.  If we could start with a blank page and design a tax system, it no doubt would be very different from what we have.  (My vision might vary radically from yours, but nobody can say with a straight face that the current tax code is optimal.) In a democracy that thrives on the clash of ideas, progress may be possible only at the margins — so that’s where we should direct our efforts.

Ideas can gain power over time; Social Security was called “the third rail of American politics” in the early 1980s, but today there is widespread (though not unanimous) agreement that at the very least, something must be done to slow growth the growth of entitlements.

The GOP has long been caricatured as the party of the rich.  That image is unfair, but Republicans ignore its existence at their peril.

Comes today the news that Republicans in the Senate blocked a proposal that would have “extended the payroll tax cut set to expire at the end of the year.”  If no extension is passed, payroll taxes will increase sharply less than a month from now.  A family with a $50,000 income in 2012 would have to pay $1,500 more than the same family with the same income in 2o11.  To pay for the tax cut extension, the Democrats’ bill would enact a 3.25% additional tax on incomes over $1 million.

In other words, according to a helpful chart at TaxPolicyCenter.org, the top marginal rate would increase from the current 35% to 38.25% — and that higher rate would be applied only to the portion of a taxpayer’s income that exceeds $1 million.

That helpful chart also shows that through most of the 20th Century, top tax rates were much higher.  From 1932 through 1981, the top rate ranged from a “low” of 63% to a high of 94%.  And throughout all or most of that time, I’ll bet the top rate kicked in at levels much lower than $1 million.

Here’s a White House sound bite to drive the point home:

President Barack Obama quickly blamed Republicans, saying in a statement that they “chose to raise taxes on nearly 160 million hardworking Americans because they refused to ask a few hundred thousand millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share.”

In other words, this stalemate enables the Democrats to say that the GOP is using tax increases on the middle class to pay for tax cuts for the rich.  The Republicans can only counter with eye-glazing explanations about the role of investment and capital formation in providing companies of all sizes with both the ability and the motivation to hire new workers and expand their businesses.

The GOP’s position on the importance of capital formation may be true, but as an argument it’s both a snoozer and a loser.  If the Republicans don’t compromise on taxes for the highest earners, they’re going to blow the chance to put a Republican in the White House.