Posted on 02/22/2013 8:16:14 AM PST by SeekAndFind
For those convinced that President Obama doesn’t deserve any blame for the fiscal gridlock, let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Mitt Romney was elected president, and was dealing with the same Congress that Obama has faced so much trouble in getting legislation to avert sequestration and myriad fiscal emergencies. Would a President Romney be confronting the same crisis?
It’s impossible to know for sure, but a look at Romney’s compromising tendencies with a Democratic Legislature as governor of Massachusetts suggest that things would look very different. Romney cut his business and political profile as a deal-maker, reaching bipartisan agreements on health care, environmental regulations, and taxes. He explicitly campaigned against sequestration, bringing it up at one of the presidential debates. Indeed, his work back home with Massachusetts Democrats was a late, if belated, argument in his campaign down the home stretch -- the theme of an expensive advertising buy.
More important, a close look at the composition of both the Senate and the House suggest the numbers would be there for Romney to pass some combination of spending cuts and the closing of tax loopholes, as he called for in the 2012 campaign. In the Senate, Romney probably would have courted the 12 red-state Senate Democrats, six of whom are up for reelection in 2014, to support some type of compromise. In the House, his task would be winning over recalcitrant conservatives.
If House Democrats were united in opposition, he could afford 17 GOP defections, probably more if the few remaining moderate Democrats joined with the GOP. It’s a little bit easier to do when your party holds the White House, as opposed to fighting in the minority.
The point of the thought experiment isn’t to relive the Romney campaign but to demonstrate there was a very plausible path for a Republican president to win support for a middle-ground budget proposal. The Senate has more red-state Democrats than blue-state Republicans, and most of them are up for reelection. These same Democrats who are giving Obama trouble on gun control would be looking to cut a fiscal deal as they prepare for reelection. Win over just five of them, hold enough House Republicans in line, and voila – there’s the bipartisan compromise. It wouldn’t be easy, but it doesn’t take a political scientist to figure out the contours of such a deal.
For Obama to forge a similar path to Romney’s tax proposals would seem asinine to many of his supporters, particularly the base that helped get him elected. To give up raising taxes on the wealthy would, at first glance, be awful politics in the wake of a decisive victory over his opponent. And tax hikes on the wealthy, at least in the abstract, poll exceptionally well. But seeking an alternative plan more amenable to the GOP leadership – a combination of loophole closing and targeted spending cuts – could have potentially unpoisoned the Washington well and led to future compromises on the president’s other priorities, such as immigration.
To get significant legislation passed, presidents from both parties have found they need to take on their party’s most ideological supporters. Bill Clinton angered liberals by passing NAFTA and welfare reform. For his first legislative push, George W. Bush took on his base with the No Child Left Behind education law (with Edward Kennedy as a key partner) and a prescription-drug entitlement. George H.W. Bush famously took on his conservative base by breaking his “read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes. Obama has avoided challenging his liberal base on any issue, and that is partly why there’s such a large congressional divide in the first place. For the president, that might not be good politics, given how large a role the party base played in his two presidential victories. But it would make for better policymaking.
If true, they’ll stay home again, in greater numbers too, probably.
GOPe will never ever beat Dems at their game.
They keep trying, but they can’t.
Ah, the GOPe doesn’t represent the conservatives anyway. They disappoint more than the Dems do.
Romney would have limited or ended Obamacare, he would have presented a budget. He would have been a bit too much RINO for me but what we have is a savage Socialist hell bent on bankrupting the nation. Anyone would have been better than Obama II (even Hillary—Newt G. and Van Jones) Hard to say it we live in a MediaOcracy—not a Democracy. the New Your Times and NBC run the nation and they are doing a poor job of it.
The evidence says differently, the Romneys do appear to hate America and conservatives, 170 years of history tells us that no man in Mitt's line will serve the nation in uniform, no draft, no war, no wave of patriotism, not even two generations of Romneys running to be commander in chief during war time, can get a Romney man to enlist.
The Romneys actually abandoned and left the US because of their hatred for it, that is why Mitt's father was born in their new country, they only returned to America because of revolution in their adopted nation. The Romneys even immigrated to America in 1842, not to be Americans, but to serve Joseph Smith personally rather than from a distance.
Mitt has little of what we call personal "decency", he has always called for abortion and homosexualizing the Boy Scouts and the military, he gave us gay marriage and ran in 2012 against the GOP pro-life party platform, his lack of decency led him to leave the republican party and become an open supporter of pro-abortion democrats and Planned Parenthood.
You cannot rewrite history and make the Romneys something that they are not, Romney despised Reagan and conservatism, and has dedicated his fortune and 20 year political career to destroying those things, even to spending years trying to create the lie that Reagan was "adamantly pro-choice".
Right after Goldwater lost bumper stickers started appearing reading “Don’t Blame Me I voted Goldwater”
That’s what this article is about. But you won’t see any such bumper stickers pushing Romney. Time for your edumacation http://www.theusmat.com/
This is the eternal battle between the Romney/Rockefeller/Rove wing and the Reagan/Palin/Cruz wing of the GOP.
Running a pro-abortion, pro-homosexual agenda liberal who gave us gay marriage and created Romney/Obama care, and who labelled gun owners as insane killers, who despised Reagan, was an anti-Christian cult leader, and who despised conservatism, is why the GOP lost to Jimmy Carter the second.
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