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Thursday, January 12, 2012

UK: President Romney?

The Economist

Mitt Romney in New Hampshire
To infinity, and beyond!


MITT ROMNEY "met or beat expectations" in the New Hampshire primaries yesterday, which was what he had to do in order to get media folks like me to flood him with positive coverage and finally crown him the near-certain nominee. The dynamic here must be familiar to a Wall Street guy like Mr Romney, as it's similar to the stockmarket games that go on between corporate executives and analysts in advance of quarterly results announcements: it's not about how big the profits were so much as whether they were higher or lower than the analysts' consensus. And as ever in elections, it's interesting how descriptive and normative issues overlap; when the press use phrases like "swept to victory", we're just trying to build a bit of colourful narrative around the story, but at the same time we're imbuing it with a positive tone that then reinforces the winner's strength for the next round of the contest. In any case, barring the kind of unexpected scandalous revelations that are hard to imagine with the ultra-disciplined and long-vetted Mr Romney, he will be running against Barack Obama for president this year. And the GOP will have continued its decades-long tradition of picking the next guy in line for the nomination, as well as its somewhat less hard-and-fast rule of usually picking the guy who looks most like Buzz Lightyear.

This leaves us a bit short of stuff to talk about for a few months, until the general election gets started in earnest. There are a couple of angles one might take up. There is of course Ron Paul's striking second-place, 23% performance in New Hampshire, and what it means for the long-term strength of the libertarian current in Republican politics. Mr Paul will probably be relegated to the distant sidelines in South Carolina, but few who vote for him are doing so because they think him likely to win; they're doing so because of a firm attachment to a genuinely anti-government, non-interventionist libertarian political philosophy and/or a personal attachment to Mr Paul's crusty-old-codger character. Voting for Mr Paul is less a strategic decision than an identity statement. (If they're not already printing up the "Don't blame me, I voted for..." bumper stickers, they should be.) For this reason his vote share is not likely to fade too much through the rest of the primaries. In fact, Mr Romney's early dominance may help Mr Paul to keep his voters by removing the "wasted-vote" problem that often dogs ideologically pure candidates. There's almost no risk of a vote for Mr Paul costing any other candidate the nomination, and a libertarian who walks into the Republican convention having won a double-digit share of the primary votes has a good claim to influencing the party's ideological agenda, even if he never stood a chance of actually winning.

Or I suppose we could talk about whether Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry's newfound anti-private-equity fury is actually becoming a legitimate Republican trope, whether Mr Gingrich's $3.5m ad buy in South Carolina will spread it further, or whether the furious counterrevolution by party insiders is already squelching the flame. Or we could talk about the possibly declining significance of social conservatives, as even the anti-Romney opposition this year comes largely from a libertarian candidate, not an evangelical as in 2008. I suppose we'll have to think up something.

But here's a different concept. How about we spend a few months trying to find out what Mitt Romney would actually do as president, and whether his policies would be beneficial? I think it would be especially worthwhile to devote some effort to this because it's unusually difficult to figure out what side of various issues Mr Romney is on, or what side he's on at the moment, or what side he'll be on by the time the general election really gets rolling this summer. One modest example: does he or doesn't he believe that the minimum wage should be indexed to inflation? According to political scientist John Sides, a New Hampshire voter who asked him about this just days ago has him on video saying the answer is yes. (This appears to be her video and it's pretty definitive: "My view has been to allow the minimum wage to rise with the CPI, or with another index, so that it adjusts automatically over time.") But as of the 2008 campaign, he wasn't sure; he said it needed more study. Then again, before that, he was definitely for indexing; the Club for Growth notes that as governor of Massachussetts he was "on record supporting indexing the minimum wage to inflation." The official campaign website doesn't seem to have anything to say about the minimum wage.

What if we spent a little time focusing on this issue, and getting Mr Romney to commit clearly once and for all to a position on this? You could go one better: contrary to popular wisdom, the evidence indicates that presidential candidates largely try to fulfill their campaign promises, though they are often frustrated by Congress. If it turns out that Mr Romney was actually stating his position a few days ago, why not ask both him and Barack Obama to commit to indexing the federal minimum wage to inflation no matter who wins the campaign this year? If they don't actually disagree on this issue, why not remove the possibility for manufacturing fake disagreements as campaign ploys, and generate a firm consensus that results in the federal government actually doing something in 2013? Even better, once it's become clear that both presidential candidates support indexing the minimum wage to inflation, perhaps someone could introduce a bill to do so this year, forcing both parties to approve it in order to avoid embarrassing their respective candidates? I'm just riffing here. What do you guys think? Is it a concept.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/01/mitt-romney-new-hampshire

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