comment& commentary
Viewpoints Steamboat Today • Monday, October 8, 2012
8
Commentary
Obama’s second-term blahs Clarence Page
Tribune Media Services
After scraping around for something — anything — good to say about President Barack Obama’s debate performance, I came up with this much: At least he didn’t look at his watch. That disastrous gesture by incumbent President George H. W. Bush near the end of his 1992 debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot pretty much sunk whatever re-election chances he still had. Page Obama suffered from the same sort of bored, disengaged, hohum presentation at his face-off with Republican nominee Mitt Romney in Denver. Call it the second-term blahs. Running for re-election, incumbent presidents completely fall out of practice. After four years of being surrounded by deferential yes-men and yes-women, presidents simply forget what it is like to face somebody who pointedly is accusing them of wrecking the country. Did Obama forget that he was not standing on that stage to hold a civil conversation? Televised presidential debates are political theater. What you say is less important than how you say
it, especially to the estimated 5 percent or so of voters who still are undecided. Many, by nature, are low-information voters or, sometimes, slow-information voters. It never hurts to repeat, repeat, repeat your talking points to this crowd, no matter how many times you have heard yourself say them. Romney understands. With his polls sinking in the battleground states, he cheerfully threw everything that he had into the fight — plus more than a few things that he did not have, such as facts that were on his side. For example, when Romney raised his by-now-familiar charge that, “On Medicare for current retirees, he’s cutting $716 billion from the program,” I thought Obama would hit it out of the park. He would at least, I thought, note that the cost savings was not coming at the expense of Medicare beneficiaries. It is coming from insurance companies, hospitals and other providers. The insurers and providers agreed to the cuts in return for the money they will gain from Obamacare’s reducing the number of uninsured patients they currently care for. Here’s a specific way that Obama helps curb Medicare’s rising costs while expanding health care coverage. Romney’s running mate Rep. Paul Ryan was impressed enough to include
it in his much-touted budget proposal. Romney rejects it, without any specifics as to how he would replace it. That’s not the only cost Romney is vague about. For example, he flatly rejected Obama’s assertion that Romney’s 20 percent across-the-board tax cut would cost $5 trillion during the next decade — and raise taxes on the middle class while giving a cut to the wealthy. “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut,” Romney said. “What I’ve said,” he continued, “is I won’t put in place a tax cut that adds to the deficit.” Yet he offered no estimate of his own to counter Obama’s number as to cost or who would bear its burden. The $5 trillion figure comes from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which says Romney’s numbers don’t begin to add up without imposing a tax increase of $2,000 per household on middleincome earners. Details, details. And Romney flipped enough flipflips to make inviting targets for zingers, had Obama cared to zing a few. For example, after repeatedly promising to repeal, repeal, repeal Obamacare, he now says he wants to keep the popular parts like covering pre-existing conditions and children up to age 26. Yet he See Page, page 9
It could be his party Ross Douthat
The New York Times
In countries with parliamentary systems, political parties rarely lack for formal leadership. When the British Tories or Canadian Liberals are out of power, they have an official prime minister-inwaiting standing by, and a “shadow cabinet,” as well. There’s jockeying for influence behind the scenes, but there’s always somebody out front who can claim to speak for the party, setting its agenda and making Douthat a case to the country as a whole. Not so in the United States. Here, parties in their out-of-power years tend to slip into low-grade civil wars, with rival camps inside Washington and various warlords — er, governors — squabbling on the periphery. Not coincidentally, the parties tend to look their worst during these periods: fractious and solipsistic, intellectually confused or ideologically extreme, with opportunists grabbing for the megaphone at every opportunity. The Republican Party has been effectively leaderless for almost six years, ever since the 2006 midterm elections made George W. Bush’s lame-duck status official. John McCain was so mistrusted by
conservatives that he probably would have felt like an interim figure even if he hadn’t gone down to defeat in 2008, and after the general Republican rout that year, the party’s public image suddenly was defined more by media personalities — from Rush Limbaugh to Glenn Beck — than by any of its elected officials. The Limbaugh-Beck moment passed, but the vacuum remained — and for most of his two years of campaigning, as a primary candidate and then as the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney conspicuously failed to fill it. He seemed content to take his party as he found it, and to conform rather than to lead: in the primaries because conformity was the safest way to reassure his critics, and in the general election because his campaign apparently thought that a generic Mr. Republican would be able to glide to victory in the fall. That finally changed in the first presidential debate. In 90 prime-time minutes, the country had a glimpse of what our politics might look like if the Republican Party actually had a leader again. What Romney executed Wednesday night was not just a simple pivot to the center, as much of the post-debate analysis suggested. Pivot he certainly did — stressing bipartisanship and touting his record as the moderate governor of a lib-
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eral state, backing away from the more implausible spending cuts implied by his budget promises, explicitly breaking with the idea that upper-bracket tax cuts can be a self-financing free lunch. But this wasn’t some sort of Sister Souljah moment, where Romney called out his fellow conservatives in order to curry favor with the center. Rather, what he did was clarify, elevate and translate. He clarified what kind of tax reformer he would be, by promising that revenue neutrality would take priority rather than sweeping cuts for the rich — a premise that plenty of Republicans already are happy to accept. He elevated an argument that’s increasingly popular among conservative wonks — that the Dodd-Frank financial reform perpetuates “too big to fail” — and used it to make a populist case against the president. And he translated the basic free-market vision to a nonideological audience, by talking more about decent jobs than heroic job creators, and more about the struggling middle class than about the supposedly persecuted John Galts. This is the role that an effective party leader ought to play. Media fantasies notwithstanding, you can’t lead a party by repudiating its base or campaigning against its reigning ideology. But you can See Douthat, page 9
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