Mitt Romney will have to do more than play Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama's Jimmy Carter

Sadly, this summer Andy Griffith died. Growing up in the 1970’s, watching the Andy Griffith show was simply part of our day. Between episodes of Howdy Doody, The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island, the Andy Griffith Show was just another show where life lessons played out on TV. Together these shows were “Americana” incarnate, where stories about honesty, hard work and community were on display daily.

My wife, who was born and raised in France, recently stumbled across Andy Griffith reruns and decided to record them. She finds them quite entertaining and I’m happy to watch them with her as I find great pleasure in explaining the subtleties of life in the United States that one might not pick up if they did not grow up here.

I often find myself thinking about the 1970’s in a very nostalgic way, which is probably not unusual for anyone who spent their early teens growing up then. Of course from the perspective of an adult the memories of the 1970’s are probably a bit less sanguine. New York City almost went bankrupt in 1975, went black in 1977 and its stories of the Son of Sam and the killing of John Lennon shocked the nation. And things weren’t much better in the rest of the country with lines at gas stations winding around city blocks, labor unrest rampant, and smokestack industries choking… the United States was an economic basket case. By the end of the decade the misery index was at a record high (inflation + unemployment) and interest rates were sitting at 15%. To put a bow on it, the decade ended with Love Canal, Three Mile Island, a coming Ice Age and 52 American hostages in Iran scaring Americans into thinking the world was coming apart at the seams. Things looked dark indeed.

Thankfully, in 1980 Americans threw out the dour and clueless Jimmy Carter after he scolded them the year before:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning....

I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel....

Carter was right about part of that… for most of the United States’ history Americans have indeed been proud of hard work, strong families and close-knit communities. And a belief in God too. Fundamentally they felt that, in America, anything and everything was possible. Anyone, regardless of their background, could be successful, or could at least work hard and set their children up for success. Why? Because America was, well… free.

In 1981 Ronald Reagan rode in on a white horse and saved the country. More than the tax cuts, more than his building up the military and the breaking the Soviet Union, more than shrinking the rest of government, Reagan made Americans believe again that they could succeed, that they could once again find prosperity and they could once again live in the Shining city on a hill to which he so often referred. Fast forward 30 years and the United States finds itself in a similarly dire situation where the economy is in the midst of an economic malaise, a befuddled president is clueless as to how to successfully direct the nation out of its storms, either domestic or foreign, and a wide swath of the nation feels like the country’s best days may indeed be behind it.

The question is, can Mitt Romney reprise the roll of Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama’s Jimmy Carter? Maybe, but in all reality, Mitt Romney will have to do far more than was ever asked of Ronald Reagan.

Why? Because the borg of government has made success so much more difficult. In 1981 the world was a different place. The EPA had only been in existence for a decade and its budget was $3 billion. Today the EPA has metastasized into a $10 billion octopus that is far more aggressive as it seeks to extend its tentacles to virtually every aspect of the economy from spilled milk to broken light bulbs to the carbon dioxide we exhale. In 1981 our national debt was 35% of GDP and while today it approaches a staggering 110%. In 1981 the federal Department of Education was a mere two years old and played almost no role in education while today it’s a $150 billion a year leviathan that infects schools across the country.

In what is perhaps the most telling illustration of a government out of control, take a look at the laws themselves. In 1981, after 194 years of the Republic, the Code of Federal Regulations (the complete list of federal regulations) was approximately 80,000 pages long. Today, a mere 31 years later Code has more than doubled to 170,000 pages! Every one of those pages, be they focused on employment, school lunches, banking, TV advertising or toys, makes it far more difficult for the nation to pull itself up off of the ground, dust itself off and continue the march to prosperity.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the federal government. States and local governments have grown similarly oppressive, with their obscene union contracts, which land on the shoulders of taxpayers, their onerous regulatory environments, and their abject failure in education combining to handicap Americans in the fight to regain their economic footing. The tentacles of these local leviathans show themselves every day in stories about children’s lemonade stands being shut down, people being arrested for cutting hair illegally, or more painfully, in the students who leave schools poorly equipped to face the challenges ahead.

For most of the country’s history the United States has been one of the freest nations in the world. It was that freedom that helped the United States rescue the world from two world wars, win a Cold War, invent everything from the mechanical reaper to sliced bread to silicon chips, and revolutionize industries from automobiles to spaceships and everything in between. In short, the United States has been the economic engine driving the world’s prosperity for a century. For most of the 80’s the United States was generally considered the third freest country in the world, behind Singapore and Hong Kong. Today, the Frasier Institute ranks it 18, not only behind Hong Kong and Singapore, but also behind such bastions of freedom as Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Finland, Chile, Estonia and Denmark.

It was a different world indeed. In 1981 Americans were sufficiently free to shake off the body blows of progressivism and resume that march towards prosperity. By 1984 Ronald Reagan had the economy growing by 7% a year. Today? After experiencing a far less severe recession, Barack Obama has the US economy growing by less than 2% a year. To put that in perspective, growing at 7% a year, it would take you a little over 10 years to double your income. At 2% a year it would take you 36 years. Now expand that to the national economy and you see the difference freedom makes.

The country is certainly a different place than it was when Andy Griffith was keeping the streets of Mayberry safe from pick pockets or settling disputes between feuding clans. It’s also a different place from the one Ronald Reagan inherited in 1981. While Americans may no longer be tethered to a telephone hanging on the wall or stuck getting their news or entertainment from a newspaper or television, those new freedoms and choices pale in comparison to the freedoms and choices lost in terms of their own economic opportunities. At the end of the day it’s great that you can get the latest football scores or watch YouTube videos on your iPhone, but at the same time it’s far more difficult to start a business to pay for it or keep a job to pay for the house you live in.

In order to help lead the country out of the economic abyss that Barack Obama and a quarter century of progressivism has plunged us into, Mitt Romney will not only have to be Ronald Reagan, he will have to be something more as well. He will not only have to reawaken the American spirit of possibilities, he must play the role of Alexander in the face of the Gordian Knot of government regulations. If he can accomplish those twin tasks by the end of his first term, his reelection campaign should be a simple one: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” A successful Mitt Romney should be able to hear a resounding, enthusiastic, unambiguous yes from everywhere in the country, including the little town Andy Griffith based Mayberry on, Mount Airy, North Carolina.

Beyond Mitt... the Conservative challenge to saving America

In 1990 I knew everything I needed to know about Rush Limbaugh. He was a racist. He was sexist. He was an arrogant, rich SOB who didn’t care about the poor. He was a fool who knew nothing about how the world worked. How did I know these things despite never once having listened to his program? Via the media of course. Despite having a Bachelor’s in Political Science, I paid very little attention to actual politics. As a grad student I paid cursory attention to the news and didn’t much venture beyond what I saw on ABC news.

One day while arguing about Limbaugh something of an epiphany was forced on me by my roommate. He simply asked, “Have you ever actually listened to him?” As I stammered a bit I had to admit that I had not. It dawned on me that I was speaking quite authoritatively about someone I knew so little about… Hence the epiphany. Not about the nature of Limbaugh, but rather about the notion of taking what media says about someone or something as gospel. Today I take virtually everything I hear or read with a grain of salt. When possible I compare what I’ve heard with what I know firsthand. When that’s not possible I make sure that I look to sources I trust for corroboration.

As for Limbaugh, I started listening to him and it took a while for him to grow on me. At first blush he’s rather bombastic and just a wee bit arrogant. After a while however it became clear that at the core, he is, as he puts it “Right, 99.7% of the time”. One might not always appreciate his particular brand of commentary, but, far more often than not he is spot on in terms of the point he is making.

To this day, despite having the most popular and profitable radio program in the United States, Limbaugh remains a polarizing figure. He is a convenient lightning rod for the left as they seek to mischaracterize the conservative message he promotes. And they have done a great job of disparaging conservatives. From a sexist Rush Limbaugh to the Tea Party racists to Paul Ryan seeking to throw Grandma off a cliff, the left in general and the media in particular have done a spectacular job of misrepresenting conservatives to those who are like I was twenty years ago, too busy or lazy to look at the facts.

As such I’d like to provide a little reality to the way conservatives are characterized.

Myth: Conservatives hate government and want to get rid of it. Reality: Conservatives know you need government, just not big government. They believe that government should be small and should do only those things for which it is Constitutionally empowered. Conservatives believe that citizens, either individually, as part of a family or a community or even as owners of corporations can make better decisions than government can. This does not suggest that conservatives believe that everything works perfectly without government. They simply believe that government is a poor vehicle with which to address most problems.

Myth: Conservatives are racists.
Reality: Conservatives focus on the rule of law and individual responsibility. Conservatives generally oppose affirmative action programs not because they hate minorities, but rather they believe in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. that Americans should “Not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Conservatives don’t believe that government contracts or school admissions should be forced to reflect the specific demographic makeup of the United States any more than the NBA or NHL should be.

Myth: Conservatives don’t care about the poor.
Reality: Conservatives care greatly about the poor and needy, they just don’t think government is the solution to the myriad problems that the poor face. Indeed, in his 2007 book “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism” Arthur C. Brooks shows that conservatives, or people who disagree with this statement, "The government has a basic responsibility to take care of the people who can't take care of themselves," are 27 percent more likely to give to charity than liberals. Conservatives don’t hate the poor, they simply don’t believe that failed government redistribution programs are the way to lift people out of poverty. They believe that communities and churches and private organizations would do a far better job.

Myth: Conservatives love big business.
Reality: Conservatives certainly love business because they recognize that America’s capitalist system has generated more wealth and improved the condition of man more than any other economic system in the history of the world. However, conservatives are actually frequently at odds with big business because of the cozy relationships big, established businesses often nurture with politicians and bureaucrats to the disadvantage of their smaller competitors. Conservatives would rather see big companies go bankrupt so that their assets can be rationalized rather than having the government support them and distort the markets. Failure and reinvention are, after all, at the core of economic success.

Myth: Conservatives want to destroy education in the United States.
Reality: Conservatives want their children and grandchildren and friends’ children educated as much as anyone. Conservatives simply don’t want the government running the education industrial complex. They look at the skyrocketing costs, unaccountable bureaucracies and abysmal performance records in the country’s public schools and believe a free market provides a far better opportunity for students to get a good education.

There are of course many other myths the left has successfully propagated about conservatives that have manifested themselves into our political landscape. That’s a problem for conservatives in general and in particular for the kinda / sort of conservative Mittens Romney. The economic foundation of the United States is not going to be saved by simply putting Barack Obama in the unemployment line, although that is certainly a necessary first step…

Rolling back the government and unleashing the economic might of the United States is going to take a conservative Congress sufficiently motivated to make the hard choices and be willing to bear the arrows of a cornered left. And this is where the tire hits the road. Conservatives have to stop allowing the left to define what conservatism means. Rush does a great job of energizing the base, but the reality is not everyone is lucky enough to get pushed into an epiphany as I was. Not everyone will be on board with everything in the conservative agenda, but 90% agreement is better than 10%... at least then we'd still have a country to talk about.

Conservatives must make crystal clear the choices Americans face. It’s not between mending Medicare and killing Grandma. It’s not between closing the Department of Education and illiterate children. It’s not between cutting taxes and starving the homeless. It’s between the Republic and failure. Conservatives need to take a page from the dairy farmers with their Got Milk moustaches and tee shirts. Find an engaging and compelling meme to highlight the conservative message and invite Americans to understand what it means. If you get people talking about the real issues then the possibility exists to bring them over from the dark side. I wonder how James Earl Jones would look in a "got conservative" tee shirt…

An uninspiring Mitt Romney will impale the GOP and give Barack Obama 4 more years...

What is Mitt Romney doing in the Republican Party? (Although a better question might by why has the Republican Party strayed so far to the left that a guy like Mitt Romney could be its standard bearer…)

Everyone knows the story of Mitt Romney. He ran Bain Capital and financed a number of new businesses and helped rescue others. True, he and Bain failed a few times, but Bain Capital did what it was supposed to do, which is make money for its shareholders. At the end of the day Bain Capital was a net plus in that it actually produced prosperity (and jobs) for a significant number of people, and that accomplishment cannot be obviated simply because they could not rescue every firm they took a position in.

In 1994 Romney sought to unseat Ted Kennedy from the US Senate but lost as Kennedy pilloried him for lacking core (political) convictions. The fact that he had difficulty establishing a coherent message didn’t help. He lost badly. In 2002 he headed west to manage the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. By all accounts he did a tremendous job and accomplished the financial equivalent of a perfect game, making the Olympics profitable for the host city.

Then of course there was his stint as governor of one of the bluest states in the union, Massachusetts. Like Scott Brown, a Republican in Teddy Kennedy’s neighborhood can be expected to be a RINO, and Romney certainly fit the bill. On a variety of issues both social and economic Romney was… shall we say purple in his approach. But at the end of the day he was more conservative than his predecessor in one of America’s most liberal states.

Add to that the fact that he’s a good looking guy with a great family and he seems like a poster child for putting Barack Obama in the unemployment line. It’s claimed he’s the Republican who can deliver Massachusetts and other key states like as Pennsylvania, Florida and probably Ohio and Nevada.

The problem is, he won’t.

When conservatives stand by conservative ideals, when conservatives clearly and coherently articulate the conservative principles of limited government, fiscal restraint and low taxes, they win. Not sure? In the three Reagan elections (counting Bush-41 in ’88 as an extension of Reagan’s policies) the GOP garnered 54% of the popular vote and beat the Democrats by an average of 11.9%. Contrast that with the elections since Reagan, beginning with Bush 41’s second run. Over the course of those five elections, the GOP has garnered an average of 44.4% of the vote while the Democrats earned an average of 48.3%. The GOP went from an average of 11.9% ahead to an average deficit of 4.4%. That is a 15 point swing in the wrong direction. What’s the difference? Solid conservative vs. milquetoast moderate. Unfortunately Mittens Romney is an extension of that milquetoast strategy.

Ominously, while 2012 may be the most important American election in a century, the two candidates seeking the White House are not going to be particularly distinguishable to voters – if we assume Mittens gets the nomination. Everyone knows that Barack Obama is a statist with socialist & populist instincts. Romney, in slight contrast, may be a capitalist, but on government policy he’s not enormously different. He supported the government’s TARP bailouts of the banks, he regularly plays the populist card of middle class tax cuts while arguing for increasing taxes on the rich, and of course there is RomneyCare, his signature achievement in Massachusetts that was literally the blueprint for the thing he rails against at every whistle-stop event: ObamaCare. Then there is his 59 point tax plan which does little to streamline the tax code and of course penalizes those earning over $200,000 a year. Finally there is his bizarre suggestion last week that the minimum wage should be indexed to inflation, something even our Socialist in Chief has not suggested. (Is it possible that the financial genius Mitt has no clue about how actual economics work?)

At this critical time when the United States is so clearly heading down the road to perdition what the country needs is someone to stand up on the biggest soapbox he can find and sing the praises of the capitalist system and make a clear and articulate argument for small, constitutional, limited government. We need someone to inspire and challenge the American people to throw off the yoke of the nanny state and pick themselves up by their bootstraps and in doing so become the economic vanguard of the world once again. Unfortunately, what we get instead is a GOP candidate who is in many respects largely indistinguishable from his statist, redistributionist opponent.

There is an old saying that you can’t fight something with nothing. In the case of Mitt Romney the GOP is hoping to fight the omnipresent government type Obama with the slightly less onerous, big government type Romney. Conservatives despise Barack Obama and they would likely turn out to vote if the GOP were to trot out Mickey Mouse to run against him. They won’t require the GOP to light a fire under them to get them to the polls. The middle sea of “moderates” on the other hand won’t respond to nothing. If the mass of largely disengaged Americans who are not political junkies finds that there is little or nothing to distinguish the candidates from one another then they will likely remain on the sidelines and not bother to vote. In a tight race intensity is the key to success. As such, Romney is a losing candidate. As can be seen by the fervency of the not-Romney elements of the GOP, the anemic turnout in Florida and Romney’s canned speeches and uninspiring debate performances, Mitt Romney is incapable of stirring the animal spirits of the base, never mind the general public.

Barack Obama is salivating at the prospect of facing off against Mittens. Knowing that Romney is incapable of articulating or defending strong conservative principals or even inspiring his own party – never mind the muddling middle – Obama can do what he does best: demagogue Republicans (up and down the ticket) and inspire his base with populist platitudes that are like blood in the water to the left. The result will not only be another four years of Barack Obama, but it will likely mean something of a bloodbath in the down ticket races as well, from the House to the neighborhood dog catcher.

Mitt Romney may be the candidate who finally puts an end to a Republican Party that has outlived its usefulness and ushers in a truly conservative Tea Party driven party. One might wish that GOP good riddance. The only question is however, will the United States as we know it survive another four years of Barack Obama so that there’s something left for the Tea Party cavalry to come to the rescue of?

Tea Party vs. the GOP establishment - Begging for a brokered convention...

For much of the last three years, I, like so many others who were so despondent after the election of 2008, assumed that the election of 2012 was finally going to provide the American people with a real choice of philosophies.

On the one side you have President Obama and the progressive / fascist utopia. (Fascist in the economic sense – where private property remains, but government dictates its usage – rather than the Nazi anti-Semitic / nationalist sense.) This utopia is where government plays the role of caretaker of the nation, where government tells citizens what they can and can’t do with their property, what they must buy and where they must invest, where unions have the power to coerce both government officials and private corporations that pay their members salaries.

On the other side the Tea Party was going to make sure that for the first time in 30 years a conservative nominee would be the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The platform would include radically smaller government, less intrusive government, and lower taxes coupled with a less complicated tax code – maybe even the Fair Tax – and a strict adherence to the 10th Amendment. Life was indeed going to be good again and prosperity would soon come roaring back.

Given the failure of everything progressive, from welfare to education to the USSR to practically the entire European continent, Americans would finally be given the choice between continuing down that well trod path to failure and a going down that forgotten path of economic liberty that was the foundation of American prosperity since the revolution.

Somehow, somewhere along the road leading to that fateful, Solomanic fork in the road, something went wrong. Not on the left. No, President Obama has indeed been as progressive as most of us feared, and in some cases far worse. Actually, the problem is on the right. Where many of us were hoping that the standard-bearer of the GOP would be a clean, if not perfect, conservative, increasingly it looks as if the nominee is going to be someone other than that.

In the one corner we have Mitt Romney who to this day refuses to renounce Romneycare, the Massachusetts disaster that spawned Obamacare. He also was an early supporter of cap and trade, was gullible on global warming, opposes a flat tax or the Fair Tax and shares an unhealthy affinity with Barack Obama for class warfare.

In the other corner we have Newt Gingrich, the guy who sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi and told us to pressure our leaders to combat climate change. Although he finally admitted that was one of the stupidest things he ever did, there are other candidates for that title. He trashed Paul Ryan’s less than radical tax plan as “conservative social engineering”, supported the individual mandate in healthcare and now wants to harness local boards to determine which illegal immigrants should be allowed to pursue a “Path to legality”. I have to wonder how effective that might be in sanctuary cities around the country like San Francisco, Austin and Denver. As if all of that were not enough, after taking almost $2 million from Fannie & Freddie and praising their work and the GSE model itself, he now wants us to believe that the only thing he did for the money was tell them their businesses were going to fail. Really?

There are of course others in the race and they too are imperfect, but at least with Perry and Bachman you know they are true conservatives mostly dedicated to a smaller government. Unfortunately for the two of them, their campaigns barely register a pulse when it comes to the polls.

At the end of the day one has to ask, what happened to the Tea Party revolution? How is it possible that the two men leading the race for the 2012 GOP nomination are big government, crony capitalist chameleons who are far less inclined to upend the Washington applecart than work with the people driving it? Why are not the leading GOP candidates shouting from the rafters that they will radically slash government spending and regulation, that they will champion a flat tax and that they will impose a strict adherence to the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment?

Despite the best efforts of the media and the Democrats to paint the Tea Partiers as racist rubes and the Occupy Wall Streeters as noble sophisticates put upon by the evil capitalist system, the American people recognize the truth. The fact that the PR field is so heavily tilted towards OWS, yet citizens still have a more favorable view of the Tea Party, tells you everything the GOP needs to know about the coming election. If they would simply run a candidate who proudly articulates basic conservative principles, the next election would result in the country being freed from the tightening progressive noose around its neck. Without such a candidate, with just another standard-bearer Americans can’t distinguish from the big government GOP they’ve come to know, Barack Obama may indeed triumph.

With Gingrich and Romney sitting in the pole positions, I find myself pulling for a brokered convention that results in an opening for someone other than Frick and Frack to take the nomination. Someone like Sarah Palin, or even the forgetful but conservative Rick Perry. Sure that’s an unlikely scenario, but at this point the traditional route has brought us two paper tiger conservatives leading the pack. The Tea Partiers and the country deserve an opportunity to make a clear choice between progressivism and conservatism. Let’s hope that somehow the GOP can figure out how to give that to them. Otherwise it may be another four years of hoping for change.