Mitt Romney is running against a different man than the Pied
Piper of “transformational change” who danced and floated to
victory against John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.
Romney’s opponent is that man’s clone — scaled down to one-eighth
the size. He’s a much smaller and distinctly meaner version of the
Barack Obama of four years ago, and he knows how to fight in only
one way — small and dirty.
Instead of promising to heal the earth, cause the oceans to
recede, and create “new industries and millions of new jobs that
pay well and can’t ever be outsourced,” President Mini-Me is
constantly on the attack — but only over the most trivial or
irrelevant of issues. And there is not bit of truth he won’t bend
or break.
As the Wall Street Journal
commented in its lead editorial on April 26:
One of Mr. Romney’s trickiest challenges will be how to handle
Mr. Obama’s, er, veracity. More than any President we’ve seen, this
incumbent is willing to say things that aren’t in the same area
code as the truth. He gives himself credit for the natural gas
drilling boom, the deficits are still Mr. Bush’s fault, Mr. Obama
has never raised taxes, and “green jobs” in his dream economy are
blooming by the millions.
In fairness to President Mini-Me, one may recall the old legal
adage: When the law is on your side, you argue the law; when you
have the facts, you argue the facts; and when you have
neither, you pound the table.
And so the president goes around the country pounding the table
on issues that are totally misleading or grossly overstated. He
goes around righting wrongs that exist only within the overwrought
imagination of liberals whose minds are permanently stuck in the
righteous and indignant mode of thought.
Last week, the president was at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill to promise more loan forgiveness to college students
— as if universal free (i.e. government-paid) college education
were the next urgently-needed entitlement… and as if the guarantee
of spending four years in college at government expense might solve
the problem of extraordinarily high unemployment among college
graduates and others under the age of 30.
With his habit of pulling “facts” out of the air, the president
claimed that the nationalization of the student loan market two
years ago had somehow “saved” billions of dollars — money that
might otherwise have gone to privately owned banks in the form of
profits. Why should anyone in his right mind think that the worker
bees in the Department of Education would do a better job of
processing and making loans than their counterparts in the nation’s
banks?
It’s too bad one of the students didn’t have the wit to ask the
president whether a more profitable bank sector might result in
more jobs for graduating students.
A week earlier, President Mimi-Me was pounding the table on
another pseudo-issue — in promising to do battle against
unidentified speculators said to be manipulating oil and gas
prices.
“So today,” he proclaimed in the Rose Garden, “we’re announcing
new steps to strengthen oversight of energy markets… I call on
Congress to pass a package of measures to crack down on illegal
activity and hold accountable those who manipulate the market for
private gain at the expense of millions of working families.”
Is there a staler joke in all of politics than the notion that
politicians can drive down prices at the gas pump by going after
speculators?
Maybe someone will explain to the president that speculators
actually play an important role in stabilizing many markets,
including the oil market. It is their willingness to take risk that
allows others (including utilities and the millions of working
families served by them) to control or avoid risk.
Not that he would listen.
Clearly, this is a president who needs every diversion he can
find from running on the record of his first four years in office.
And the last thing he wants is to do a 180-degree turn in embracing
market-based as opposed to government-directed decision-making.
That is why he and his supporters have conjured up a whole
series of diversionary issues over the past few weeks.
First, the administration went out of its way to pick a fight
with social and economic conservatives who were sure to be
offended by the Department of Health and Human Service edict that
employers, including religious organizations, must cover the cost
of contraception in their health plans. Apart from any moral
objections to the edict, why should the federal government tell
employers and employees what their health insurance has to cover?
Still more, why would the government intervene to cover such a
small cost (contraceptive pills hardly fall under the category of a
catastrophic expense requiring insurance protection)?
What the brouhaha over contraception has done is to shift the
larger debate over Obamacare and the future of the nation’s health
care system into a boiling teapot of false accusations to the
effect that Republicans and conservatives are waging a “war on
women” in opposing a senseless (and, indeed, a mischievous)
government edict.
Then there was the rush-to-judgment over the death of
Trayvon Martin — allowing gleeful leftists to call anyone a
racist who did not join the lynch mob of those who leapt to the
conclusion that his slaying must be and could only be a
racially-motivated hate crime.
Finally, there is the “Buffett Rule,” which the president
mentions at every stop — as if it would make a huge difference in
setting the country on the road to fiscal probity as well as
“social justice.” The Buffett Rule would oblige those earning more
than $1 million to pay at least 30% of their annual income taxes,
whether it was earned income (already taxed at a 35 percent
marginal rate) or capital gains (now taxed at 15%).
According to the president’s White House National Economic
Council, this proposal would do little or nothing to bring down the
federal deficit. It would raise a mere $4 to $5 billion a year in
new revenue.
Worst of all, in doubling the capital gains rate, the “Buffett
Rule” would represent a major new tax on investment coming in the
midst of what has already proved to be the weakest economic
recovery in the past 60 years.
But no matter.
The Buffett Rule does one thing rather well: It allows President
Mini-Me to talk about “fairness” and to wage class warfare against
top earners while diverting attention from his own record of
economic ineptitude and failure.
The Wall Street Journal concluded its editorial by
saying:
Mr. Romney can’t let the President get away with this, or Mr.
Obama will conjure a vision of unreality that enough voters might
believe. The challenger has to find a way to mock the mirage of an
“economy built to last” without sounding arch or personal. He needs
his own vision of Reagan’s “there he goes again.”
I would say let President Obama pound the table all he wants —
given that he has neither the facts nor any understanding of what
it will take to fix an ailing economy on his side. The more the
president dissociates himself from the candidate he was four years
ago, the better it will be for Romney — and the country. Mini-Me
will be his own worst enemy.
