This post by TDS Contributor and Democratic strategist Mike Lux is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on June 22, 2012.
This news about Bain Capital being a pioneer in outsourcing, investing in some of the leading early companies that advised American companies in how to most effectively do it, is a pretty big deal on the face of it, but it has even deeper implications than many people realize. Being in this kind of business when the vast majority of Americans are so upset by out-sourcing is just one of Mitt Romney’s deep dark secrets that he has been trying to hide, and helps to powerfully make the case that Romney’s entire business career has been fundamentally at odds with the interests of the American middle class.
The other thing this news does is that it very likely ends the debate within the Democratic party as to whether it is okay to talk about Bain Capital’s business practices. There are still going to be Wall Street Democrats squeamish about beating up on this kind of wealthy financial company, but to defend a company that was literally a pioneer in helping American companies out-source jobs would be incredibly unpopular. Given how deeply unhappy voters are about out-sourcing, given how it generally is one of the top issues mentioned by voters in any poll I have seen over the last decade, it would be political malpractice not to attack Bain and Romney over this news, and any honest Democrat will have to understand and acknowledge that fact.
The reason this story goes so deep is that Romney’s entire political strategy is based on carrying blue collar white voters very heavily. Obama won 53 percent of the vote in 2008 while losing white working class voters by 18 percent. Even if you assume Obama doesn’t do quite as well turning out his base voters, to win this election Romney will have win that white working class demographic by at least 62-38 percent. Given how big a deal out-sourcing is to blue-collar workers, this story becomes close to a deal-breaker for Romney.
The Romney campaign’s reaction to the story is hilarious:
“This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports.” The very incoherence of the quote speaks to their strategy: try to confuse the issue, try to make it sound complicated. The problem for Romney is that this is a remarkably simple story: whether you call it out-sourcing or off-shoring (and I don’t see how the new word helps him), Romney was caring only about his company’s profits and not at all about creating jobs here in the U.S., and he saw out-sourcing jobs as a great new way to make money.
Perhaps as interesting as the story itself is the fact that after four years as governor of Massachusetts, and more than six years of his running for the presidency non-stop, even with all his talk about his business career helping him understand job creation, this is the first time we have heard about these investments. Mitt Romney is big into secrets, and is very good at keeping them. He has Swiss bank accounts, and Cayman Island accounts as well. His financial disclosure for years past has been unusually secretive in nature. He won’t say what his positions are on a whole range of critically important issues. I think we can guess why Romney tried to hide the news about his being a pioneer in out-sourcing, but why does he have secret off-shore bank accounts and so little information in his financial disclosure reports? What has he invested money in all those years that requires such skullduggery? This is as secretive a man as has run for president at least since Dick Nixon with all his dirty little secrets.
This is the candidate who said that we must only speak of issues about the concentration of wealth “in quiet rooms”. He prefers speaking about these kinds of things in quiet rooms, because to be open about how he made his money would be such an insult to the exact voters he most needs to win this election. But Romney made his incredible fortune by doing insider deals in those quiet rooms, by quietly helping companies turn a profit by out-sourcing their workers. After he made his money off these kinds of deals, he hid a great deal of it in secret Swiss and Caymans bank accounts. Is a man with these kinds of values — and these kinds of secrets — the kind of man we want to be president?
Ed Kilgore
Dear Readers:
During the last several weeks an energetic debate has broken out among leading political analysts over the role and importance of the white working class in the coming election and also over how to properly define and measure this key voting group.
Tom Edsall summarized the debate as follows in the New York Times:
…This is an issue of central importance in American politics. And it’s not just crucial for the presidential election: understanding what the white working class is and where it is going is fundamental if we want to understand where the country is going…
…Part of the problem is that different people mean different things when they are talking about the working class. Is this cohort made up of those without college degrees; those in the bottom third of the income distribution; or those in occupations described by the federal government as “blue-collar”?
TDS is pleased to present an extremely important contribution to this discussion, an analysis by Andrew Levison that quite dramatically challenges key assumptions of the conventional wisdom on this subject:
The Surprising Size of “White Working Class” America – Half of all White Men and 40 Percent of White Women Still Work in Basically Blue-Collar Jobs.
The memo is available here in a PDF format.
This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Given the immense attention rightly being devoted to the Supreme Court’s treatment of the individual mandate, it’s not surprising that far fewer words are being spilled on the Court’s other big finding: that the federal government cannot withhold all Medicaid funds from states refusing to accept the Medicaid expansion that contributes so much to the law’s goal of covering the uninsured. Among those writing about this issue, moreover, there’s a general consensus, articulated earlier today by Jonathan Cohn, that the “super-match” being offered to states accepting the expansion is just too “sweet” for any state to turn down, even without what the Court calls “coercion.” Indeed, as Matt Yglesias pointed out, the deal is particularly sweet for the southern states with large low-income populations and stingy existing Medicaid programs.
Makes sense, on the surface. But it raises a rather obvious question: if the expansion is an offer no one could refuse, why did 26 states go to court in the first place to make it possible to turn it down without losing all their Medicaid money? Were they trying to make a theoretical point they had no practical plans to pursue?
The sad truth is that Republican governors and state legislators have been claiming ever since ACA was enacted that the expansion, even with the “sweet” super-matches, would bankrupt their budgets. And the even sadder truth is that many of these solons don’t think of this as primarily a fiscal issue, but as an ideological test of their hatred of the “welfare state.” There’s a reason southern Republicans, perhaps even more than their compatriots elsewhere, love Paul Ryan’s Medicaid “block grant” proposal. They want significant reductions in the existing Medicaid program, along with structural changes that would make it unrecognizable as a low-income entitlement. This involves a philosophical objection to giving poor people free health insurance, not just a budgetary concern.
Moreover, southern GOP lawmakers aren’t entirely free to cut the best fiscal deal they can. Let’s say you are Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, a fiery conservative who sees no problem with openly crusading to drive perfectly legal private-sector labor unions right out of your state. Is it a no-brainer to accept the Medicaid expansion when the most powerful politician in the neighborhood, Sen. Jim DeMint, has this to say after the Court’s decision?
I urge every governor to stop implementing the health care exchanges that would help implement the harmful effects of this misguided law. Americans have loudly rejected this federal takeover of health care, and governors should join with the people and reject its implementation.
In reality, if states do refuse to set up exchanges, ACA allows the federal government to set them up on behalf of the uninsured in those places (and indeed, that will be the ultimate recourse for those affected by a state refusal to expand Medicaid). But the Medicaid expansion does require affirmative state action.
Assuming it survives a potential Republican president and Congress in 2013, the Medicaid expansion is going to be a red-hot issue in many states, particularly in the South, illogical as that might seem. So I agree with Alec MacGillis: The beneficiaries of the Medicaid expansion better get mobilized, not just to protect the national law but to insure it is not sabotaged in their own states.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The initial reaction to the Court’s decision on ACA among conservatives seems to have been much like that of other observers: surprise. Some, of course, were surprised by the survival of the individual mandate; more were surprised by the configuration of the majority and minority (Roberts, not Kennedy, defecting; Kennedy’s dissent calling for total invalidation).
There seemed to be a lull in commentary as right-wing gabbers tried to absorb the opinions and develop a common take. Most interestingly, Fox News cut away almost immediately to a fifteen minute interview with the Big Boss, Rupert Murdoch, to discuss his plans for the division of News Corp. into two companies (Rupert offered a few thoughts on the Court decision, too, but nothing deep). National Review‘s The Corner was uncharacteristically quiet immediately following the announcement, but soon John Hood articulated what is rapidly becoming the Big Talking Point on the Right:
First, those who dislike the mandate–which includes a majority of U.S. voters–will now have no recourse but to vote for Mitt Romney to repeal it. Second, the only way the administration prevailed was to have Obama’s main legislative accomplishment redefined as one of the largest middle-class tax increases in the history of the country.
Indeed, the initial tendency of conservatives to express rage at the Chief Justice for betraying The Cause seems to be giving way to an appreciation of what he accomplished by shaping the decision: first, by rejecting the Commerce Clause rationale for ACA, the future option of restricting federal power (and even unraveling the New Deal and Great Society programs) remains open, and second, by using the arcane constitutional doctrine of the “taxing power” to justify ACA, Roberts gave the law’s opponents a ready-made line of attack.
There’s also naturally great interest among conservatives in the 7-2 holding that the federal government cannot withhold all Medicaid funds in order to “coerce” states to go along with ACA’s Medicaid expansion, which accounts for as much as half the law’s expansion of health insurance. Already, there’s talk of states rejecting the expansion, though not much realization of how this decision may have changed partisan politics in the states quite profoundly.
By the time the president spoke, the chattering classes of the Right were in full synch about the “ObamaCare Tax Increase.” Grover Norquist should be pleased.
I’ve got two posts up at Washington Monthly that deal with big-picture strategic issues–specifically, the Romney election strategy.
One, playing off a Michael Crowley article on the 1980 and 1992 elections as being more complicated than the usual “economic referendum” assumptions about incumbent re-election cycles, examines one key reason the Romney campaign is so “focused” on a highly unspecific economic message: the policy preferences of his party are highly unpopular with non-Republicans. He needs to convince swing voters to make this a “referendum” on Obama’s economic record not just because many political scientists believe that’s what this type of election usually revolves around, but because any other message is perilous for him. To put it another way, Romney has a simple-minded message because he is encouraging swing voters to engage in a simple-minded calculation of how to vote.
Accordingly, in a second post I question the emerging CW that Romney’s campaign has been too slow or too vague in responding to developments like the president’s recent immigration initiative (and/or the Supreme Court decision on Arizona’s immigration law). Again, if you accept the premise that Romney’s whole campaign depends on ignoring issues other than poor macroeconomic indicators, it makes perfect sense that he’d be uninterested in speedy or specific reactions to developments that aren’t germane to his message. More broadly, anything that makes this a “comparative” election is unwelcome to Team Mitt.
One of the topics I’ve been covering regularly at Washington Monthly has been the politics of health care reform above and beyond the disposition of “ObamaCare” by the Supreme Court, which is likely to be announced in the next two weeks.
If the Court does strike down or disable the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, then the GOP’s alleged “replacement” plans will get considerable attention. And it’s important for Democrats to understand that Mitt Romney’s overall health care agenda–including his endorsement of the Ryan Budget and of legislation designed to disable state insurance regulation–would represent a large step back from the health care status quo ante, which would be bad enough for many millions of Americans.
Moreover, Romney’s claims to support “popular” reforms associated with ObamaCare, such as the prohibition of exclusions for pre-existing conditions, are completely bogus.
The stakes in November with respect to health care cost, coverage and quality go well beyond the simple yes-or-no questions about ObamaCare. It will represent a choice between a systematic effort to create a rational system of universal access to affordable health insurance, and a big step back towards the 1950s.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 12, 2012.
In my June 8 post on “The Recall in Broader Perspective,” I briefly referenced the GOP meme “that public workers have extravagant pensions, propagated by Republicans who amplify a few horror stories as emblematic of public worker retirement benefits.” It’s part and parcel of a broader Republican scam vilifying public workers as overcompensated in general.
For a revealing example, see Josh Barro’s Bloomberg.com post, “Does Obama Know Why the Public Sector Isn’t ‘Doing Fine’?” in which he spotlights city employees of San Jose, CA, where
…Costs for a full-time equivalent employee are astronomical and skyrocketing. San Jose spends $142,000 per FTE [full-time employee] on wages and benefits, up 85 percent from 10 years ago. As a result, the city shed 28 percent of its workforce over that period, even as its population was rising.
The unspoken, but unmistakable gist of Barro’s post is “See, those greedy public workers are responsible for causing their own layoffs.” Without even taking a look at nation-wide data, Barro is clearly suggesting in his post’s title that San Jose’s experience is somehow typical of public workers in cities across the nation. Worse, he takes it a step further and blames public worker unions in his concluding sentence, “If the president wants to know why state and local governments can’t afford to hire, he could start by asking his own supporters in public employee unions.”
That’s why Romney can say stuff about President Obama like “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message in Wisconsin?” and get away with it, while media dimwits point their fingers at Obama for his one gaffe in three years.
Had Barro clearly presented his horror story as an exceptional case, that would be defensible. Or had he backed it up with some credible national data, you could grudgingly credit him with a solid argument. But he didn’t do that because he couldn’t.
As David Cooper, Mary Gable, and Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute note in their report, “The public-sector jobs crisis“:
Despite these significantly higher levels of education–and contrary to assertions by some governors in recent state-level debates–the most rigorous studies have consistently shown that state and local government employees earn less both in wages and total compensation than comparable private-sector workers (Keefe 2010). Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and standard regression models for wage analyses, we compared the wage income of private-sector employees with that of state and local government workers. After controlling for education, experience, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, full-time/part-time status, number of hours worked, citizenship status, Census region, metropolitan status (whether residing within or outside the boundaries of a major metropolitan area), and employer size, we find that state and local government employees make, on average, 11.7 percent less in wages than similar private-sector employees.
if those greedy public workers can be faulted for their extravagant compensation packages, what should be done about their better-paid private sector cohorts?
Look, none of this is to deny that there are public worker pension/salary horror stories. But it takes a pretty shameless media to imply that extravagantly compensated public workers are the norm. Is it too much to ask that some honest journalists call Romney out on it?
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on June 7, 2012.
Ron Brownstein has a couple of recent posts tracking white working class political attitudes that should be of interest to presidential campaign strategists. In “Working Class Whites Still Wary of Obamacare,” he explains:
The problem, as on almost all issues relating to government’s role, is centered on whites, particularly those in the working class. According to figures provided by Kaiser, in their latest survey, 35 percent of non-white respondents believe that the law will benefit their family. That compares to just 14 percent who believe they will be worse off (the remaining 39 percent don’t think it will make much difference). Whites offer nearly a mirror image: just 18 percent believe the law will leave their family better off, compared to 38 percent who believe they will be worse off as a result.
The skepticism among whites is most concentrated among whites without a college degree. Just one-in-seven of them believe health care reform will personally benefit them or their family. Among college whites about one-in-four expect to personally benefit from the reform.
Gallup Polling in March 2010 found that while few whites expected to personally benefit from the law, a majority of them believed it would benefit low-income families and those without health insurance. That suggested they viewed health care reform primarily as a welfare program that would help the needy but not their own families. Kaiser didn’t replicate that question in their latest survey, but it may have detected an echo of that sentiment in the finding that twice as many whites believed the law would benefit children than thought it would help their own family.
Ironically, adds Brownstein, “…non-college whites are uninsured at much higher rates than those with degrees; for that reason, the law would personally benefit far more of them than the college-educated whites who are somewhat more open to it.” Yet, “the targets of that effort remain entirely unconvinced that the law will benefit them. Rather than ameliorating their skepticism that government will defend their interests, it appears to have only intensified it.”
Brownstein warns that the skepticism about the ACA is “another brick on the load Obama is carrying with white working class voters, who appear poised in polls to reject him at levels no Democratic presidential nominee has experienced since 1984.”
In another post, “How Diversity Divides White America,” Brownstein addresses white working class attitudes towards immigrants revealed in the just released Pew Research 2012 Values Survey:
Among college-educated whites who identify as Democrats-an increasingly central pillar of the party’s coalition-over four-in-five say that the immigrants do not threaten American values. But nearly two-thirds of Republicans without a college degree-an increasingly central pillar of the GOP coalition-do consider immigrants a threat to American traditions…That overwhelming unease among the blue-collar (and older) white voters central to GOP electoral prospects today represents a huge hurdle for the Republican strategists who want the party to expand its Hispanic outreach.
One conclusion to be drawn from both of Brownstein’s articles is that the Obama campaign should upgrade it’s outreach to white workers as a large constituency which benefits from Obama’s reforms, yet remains unpersuaded — doubt which the Republicans are eagerly prepared to reinforce in their ad campaigns.
This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was originally published on June 4, 2012.
Now that Mitt Romney is officially the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and we have some distance from the primaries that decided it all, it’s time to consider the lessons. Otherwise, poor memories, shaky analysis and self-serving spin will combine to congeal a conventional “wisdom” that is anything but.
As someone who obsessively chronicled every twist and turn of this very odd nomination contest for TNR, here are my five top takeaways:
1.Mitt Romney is a very lucky man. The Republican Party’s dominant conservative wing resisted his nomination as long and as hard as it could, but in the end, had no better options. Herman Cain was not ever going to win the nomination. Nor, likely, was the immensely vulnerable, highly unpopular Newt Gingrich or the extremist Michele Bachmann, both of whom were an oppo researcher’s dream. The two potentially viable rivals were Tim Pawlenty, who gambled everything and lost on the fool’s gold of the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa last summer, and Rick Perry, who ran one of those rare, amazingly inept presidential campaigns that are a constant reminder of the importance of minimal competence in politics. It’s a sign of Romney’s vulnerability that Rick Santorum–whose 2006 Senate defeat told you everything you needed to know about how well he wore on voters, and how much ammunition his record provided his opponents–came within a few thousand votes in Michigan of sending Mitt’s campaign into a potential death spiral and the national GOP into a panic. Anyone who tells you Romney’s nomination was pre-ordained by some iron law of succession or some shadowy “Establishment” was obviously not paying much attention to how the deal actually went down.
2. Conservatives reasserted their control of the GOP. You’ll also hear that Romney’s nomination was a victory for Republican “moderates” over “movement conservatives” or their latest grassroots incarnation, the Tea Party. Don’t believe it. Yes, hard-core conservatives would have preferred a different nominee–for the most part, someone who wasn’t running, like Jim DeMint or Mike Pence or Marco Rubio–but they had issues with virtually everyone in the actual field, and more importantly, they got what they needed from Romney, who was, as everyone seems to have forgotten, their own preferred candidate in 2008. He’s atoned for his health care heresy by promising about ten thousand times to repeal ObamaCare root and branch. He’s on board with the twin pillars of the Small Government counter-revolution, the Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, and the Ryan Budget. He’s foresworn increased taxes as any part of any budget deal, however large. He’s met all the basic social-issues litmus tests of the Christian Right. He was by most measures the hawkiest of all the candidates on foreign policy issues. And for good measure, he tacked hard right on immigration policy in order to croak Rick Perry. Thanks to his “flip-flop” problem and conservative hyper-vigilance, there will be no back-tracking by Romney between now and November, or most probably, between now and the end of time. Mitt’s no stubbornly independent cuss like John McCain. He’ll stay bought.
3. 2012 is not just “about” the economy. The primaries did not notably feature debates among Republican candidates about how, exactly, to bring the U.S. economy back. In part that’s because they were in total agreement on the big points: both fiscal and monetary stimulus of the economy are terrible ideas; excessive federal spending and extension of housing credit to irresponsible poor and minority folk caused the Great Recession; and a systematic agenda of universal deregulation, public-sector austerity, health-care rationing to reduce costs, restriction of collective bargaining rights, and high-end (including corporate) tax cuts are the prescription for recovery. That this is the conservative movement’s permanent non-cultural agenda for good times and bad is the tip-off that even the GOP’s “economic” plans are about an ideological commitment to smaller government–extending very nearly these days to a complete overturning of the New Deal and Great Society legacy–rather than any shrewd macroeconomic strategy. Beyond that, there is no question the primaries reflected an abiding preoccupation with cultural issues, whatever the candidates professed, viz. the endless angels-dancing-on-pins distinctions on whether to ban “abortifacient” contraceptives as well as clinical abortions, the war on Planned Parenthood, and the final plunge of the GOP (and for that matter, the Catholic Bishops) into full harness with the Christian Right’s long-standing position that church-state separation represents a “war on religion.” It’s hard to imagine much of anything about the subject-matter of the primary contest that would have changed had the economy been booming.
4. Super-PACs have changed politics. Whether it’s simply a matter of the drift towards uncontrolled campaign financing accelerated by Citizens United, or the hyper-mobilization of an unprecedented group of politically active billionaires, there’s no question the Super-PACs played a big role in the nomination contest. Newt Gingrich’s Palinesque media-bashing debate performances had a lot to do with his candidacy coming back from the grave twice, but he would have remained a novelty candidate like past debate phenoms had not it been for Sheldon Adelson’s decision to give him the resources to run an actual campaign. It was Romney’s Super-PAC that destroyed Perry in Iowa, Gingrich in Florida, and later on, Santorum in the Midwest. And when the losing candidates’ own sugar daddies (Adelson and Santorum’s friend Foster Friess) closed the checkbooks, it was all over. The same forces (and many of the very same people) may be about to save Scott Walker’s bacon in Wisconsin, and are in the process of challenging the assumption that the sheer power of paid media can’t win a presidential general election.
5. The crazy nomination process is here for another four years. The dog that didn’t bark in 2012 was the usual chorus of complaints about the crazy-quilt nominating process itself–the disproportionate power of the early states, and the buyer’s remorse of voters and elites stuck with a nominee they didn’t want. The stretched-out nature of the primary calendar–which kept Romney from formally claiming the nomination until late May–was part of that non-event. So, too, was the rapid consolidation of support behind Romney once he essentially clinched the nomination in Wisconsin if not earlier. There will be some grumbling about the procedural glitches that allowed Ron Paul’s minions to dominate delegate selection events long after the deal had gone down, but for the most part, minor adjustments should suffice. We’ll be stuck with the same crazy system in 2016.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Back in April, my esteemed mentor and colleague William Galston and I had an exchange at TNR about whether the presidential election would necessarily serve as a “referendum” on the president’s record (particularly with respect to the economy, of course) and what that meant for Obama’s re-election strategy. I won’t rehash the entire discussion, but Bill leaned heavily on the political science consensus that referenda are unavoidable for incumbents, while I demurred in part, citing the contrary example of 2004, the impact of polarization on the number of persuadable voters, and the need to make a sharp characterization of Mitt Romney’s sometimes hazy character and record, as factors dictating a strongly comparative Obama message.
Now after an Obama speech widely hailed as setting the tone for his campaign’s treatment of economic and fiscal issues from here on out, Galston has unsurprisingly registered concern in another TNR column:
Today in Cleveland, President Obama jettisoned the theme of economic inequality that had suffused his economic speeches for more than six months, focusing instead on “how we grow faster, how we e more jobs, and how we pay down our debt.” The real issue, he said, is how we reverse the “erosion of middle-class jobs and middle-class incomes.” In making that claim, Obama doubled down on the guiding assumption of his campaign–that he can turn the 2012 election into a choice between two models for the future, rather than a referendum on his first term. He made only a brief effort to defend his economic record, focusing instead on what he intends to do in a second term and on what he believes are the fatal flaws of the Republican/Romney agenda.
After unfavorably comparing Obama’s message to its ostensible model, Reagan’s “Morning in America” plea in 1984 against turning back the clock to the bad old days of the Carter Administration, Galston concludes:
The president and his top political advisors clearly reject the view that his record is central and believe they can make this election into a choice between two futures. As a Democrat, I hope they’re right. But as a student of American politics, I fear they’re not.
I’m not as sure as Bill is that Obama won’t spend time defending his economic record: The “boring” and “unoriginal” parts of his Cleveland speech that the pundits kept complaining about involved a lot of talk about what his administration has accomplished in areas ranging from the auto industry to education and energy. But there’s a solid reason Team Obama has been forced into a “comparative” message, and it’s not just because job growth seems to be lagging at a crucial moment in the campaign.
Even big fans of the “referendum” theory agree that challengers have to cross an invisible threshold of “acceptability” before they can defeat even the most vulnerable incumbent. Mitt Romney is running an extraordinarily evasive campaign in terms of his record in the one public office he’s occupied, and the agenda he’s been made to accept in order to win the GOP nomination. That’s no accident: There are sound reasons to believe his record and especially his agenda will be highly problematic for him, in no small part because it reflects what Bill Clinton shrewdly called (a term Obama quoted in Cleveland) “Bush on steroids”–a rightward twist on the economic policies that gave the country years of sluggish growth, rising inequality, middle-class insecurity, large budget deficits, and then the Great Recession.
One of the great ironies of contemporary politics is that Republicans have succeeded in separating themselves from the Bush legacy by moving to the right of that one-time hero of movement conservatives. They do have “new ideas,” but they are ideas that until very recently were considered out of the mainstream (e.g., total abandonment of Keynsianism, a deflationary, hard-money prejudice in monetary policy, an effort to shrink the public sector to a fixed percentage of GDP, climate-change denialism, frank opposition to public education, etc.). Making the voting public understand that development–and its implications for anyone with bad memories of the Bush administration–is essential to Obama’s ability to contextualize his own record and defend his own future agenda. To put it bluntly, if Mitt Romney succeeds in presenting himself to swing voters as this mild-mannered “moderate” technocrat who will use his business skills to “fix” the economy and otherwise leave cherished programs and public policy commitments alone, he will be well across the threshold that makes him broadly acceptable to voters seeking “change” not only from Obama’s record but from Bush’s.
Romney is not going to talk about his agenda and its organic relationship to the failed and unpopular hobbyhorses of conservatism unless he is forced to do so. The media show no great inclination to take on that task. Obama must assume it, or all the efforts in the world to defend his own record are likely to fail with low-information swing voters who have no real idea of the opposition party’s lurch in exactly the wrong direction from Bush to Romney.
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