So, you ask, tell me why Mitt Romney will make a good
president.
For background, you say you are a voter who has watched Mitt
Romney for a long time and just, well, you know, you just don’t
like him. Worse, you think that as a candidate, he’s a
dolt. You think he exhibits the emotional depth of Hymie the robot
from Get Smart. You think he has the philosophical
solidity of a sand castle below the high-tide line. You think he
shows the boldness of an Ecuadorean dipping his toe into the Arctic
Ocean and vowing never, ever again to risk such a shock to his
system.
To which the best response is: Get over it. First,
we’re not in a position to wait for perfection. Second, the skills
of a good candidate do not necessarily translate into the skills
needed for the presidency. As Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter both
proved, a good campaigner can be a godawful president. Conversely,
and more to the point here, a weak campaigner can turn into a very
good president. A man of competence and decency can steadily assert
his own style onto the template of what the public expects from the
man in the Oval Office, and grow in public stature as he does.
Let there be no mistake: Gov. Romney is by all believable
accounts a man of great personal decency and generosity, and there
can be no doubt about his competence as an administrator and
organizational leader. Mere money changers might get rich pushing
financial paper, but Romney’s history is different: He put both
money and expertise into real goods and services, acting
not just as a bettor on somebody else’s skills but instead as an
abettor of other people’s dreams, using his own management skills
as a force multiplier for sales, profits, and, yes, new jobs. His
Bain Capital company did not just trade financial capital; it
invested human capital in a way that allowed other human capital to
flourish in abundance.
These are skills a president could well use. There can be no
doubt that the behemoth that is the federal government can be
better managed — that not only can savings be achieved for
taxpayers through better management, but that services can be
better delivered even while the costs for those services are being
ratcheted downward. Sens.
Ron Johnson of Wisconsin,
Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jeff Sessions of Alabama all have
identified numerous ways such savings can be achieved.
Meanwhile, from what already was a far leaner discretionary
budget than exists now, the
Republican Congress of 1995-96 saved $50 billion not just from
projected spending but from actual, current federal appropriations,
which is the equivalent of saving more than $200 billion today.
Again, that’s just in two years; spread over ten years, those
savings would soon be adding up to what the wags call “real
money.” Does anybody really doubt that a notoriously
penny-pinching Romney, who turned a Massachusetts deficit into a
surplus, would be able to achieve similar savings with a Republican
Congress? And that, with all the fat added to discretionary
spending in the past 14 years, that he could do so without
harming the social fabric? This is not grim austerity that Romney
is promising; it’s just common sense combined with good arithmetic,
guided by a sense of public responsibility to ordinary
taxpayers.
There can also be no doubt, none whatsoever, that a President
Romney would easily succeed in overturning the medical device tax
with which Obamacare plagues the most vulnerable among us. Under
Obamacare, makers of devices such as pacemakers, insulin pumps,
asthma inhalers, prosthetics, wheelchairs, and all sorts of other
great advances in modern medical technology will be taxed, some in
ways that are likely to put the manufacturers out of business. Of
all the objectionable parts of Obamacare, this would obviously be
the first to go if Romney were to be elected.
The price of energy also would surely tumble under a Romney
administration. The laws of supply and demand cannot be denied. The
slowdown in Gulf of Mexico permitting that earned the Obama
administration a contempt of court citation would no longer apply.
The moratorium against natural gas wells off Virginia and North
Carolina, which would welcome the development, would be ended. The
Keystone Pipeline would be immediately approved. Romney would stop
the Environmental Protection Agency’s illegal reign of
regulatory terror that threatens to
drive up utility costs by massive amounts. New parts of Alaska
would be opened to drilling. The massive discoveries of oil shale
within U.S. boundaries, especially in North Dakota, would receive
far more encouragement for development. And coal, which now can be
burned more cleanly, would join entirely clean nuclear energy (a
Romney priority), among the ranks of the energy sources that no
longer would be treated like pariahs.
All of which, of course, would work to drive down costs of home
heating and air conditioning, and (quite significantly) of prices
at the pump.
If you want fewer niggling regulations on small businesses
across the board, Romney’s your man. If you want an end to the
crony capitalism that under Bill Clinton led to the Fannie
Mae/Freddie Mac scandals and that under Barack Obama led to
Solyndra and other abominable market distortions and waste of tax
dollars, Romney’s your man. If you want a real commitment to the
sort of bipartisan tax reform that Ronald Reagan achieved with Bill
Bradley in 1986 (except with continued low rates for dividends and
capital gains — low rates that benefit pensioners, including union
pensioners, as much as any group in the country), then Romney is
definitely your man. If there is anybody who understands how tax
complexity puts burdens on start-up businesses or small-business
expansion, especially, it is the man whose entire business career
was built on helping businesses just like those that build
prosperity by hiring just two or three workers at a time. In the
aggregate, this could quickly amount to five million new jobs even
without touching the half of the labor force represented by
big-business conglomerates.
The truth is that a Romney administration would hold a great
deal of promise for Americans on the edge between employment and
unemployment, and for those self-employed whose personal
enterprises are on the border between profitability and collapse.
Mitt Romney understands these situations, because these
are the situations that have been his stock-in-trade for a whole
career.
On the other hand, Barack Obama’s way has been tried, and it
failed. Just last week alone, its failures were shown in stark
relief. Last Monday, the Congressional Budget Office confirmed yet
another trillion-dollar deficit under Obama. On Tuesday,
Moody’s threatened to downgrade the national government’s bond
rating yet again, and the Kaiser Foundation showed that health
insurance premiums rose last year to nearly $16,000 per family. On
Wednesday, the Census Bureau
reported that poverty, now afflicting 46.2 million Americans,
is at a 50-year high. On Thursday, producer prices were reported to
rise by the largest monthly amount in three years, and the weekly
jobless claims rose to their highest levels since July; while on
Friday, new numbers
showed that industrial production shrank by the largest amount
in three years.
And, of course, gasoline prices now are almost precisely double
what they were when Obama took office.
There are no imaginable circumstances under which Mitt Romney,
economic turn-around specialist, could do any worse. There is ample
reason, indeed, to think he would help free the people of this
great nation to do far, far better.
Such are the things a president can accomplish by imbuing the
West Wing with a sense of mission, in the style of the most
successful small business boardrooms. How a president communicates
to and manages the people in those rooms is far more important that
how well he fulminates, prompter-aided, in front of Styrofoam
columns.
