[Vision2020] The Romney Package

[Art Deco]

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August 12, 2012
The Romney Package By BILL
KELLER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/bill_keller/index.html>

BRACE yourself for weeks of chatter about Mitt Romney’s running mate. Vice
presidents matter, as we have been spookily reminded by the recent
re-emergence of Dick Cheney on our TV screens. And Paul Ryan matters more
than most. (See below.)

But these days you don’t just elect a ticket of two; you elect a whole
package. Presidents come with a cast of advisers, think tanks, lobbyists,
legislators, donors and watchdogs. Some in the entourage end up in key
jobs; others operate as a kind of shadow cabinet, vetting choices and
enforcing doctrine.

This is especially true of Republicans, who have spent decades building a
disciplined conservative infrastructure that recruits talent, culls
dissenters and lays down the law. Compared with Democrats, who are
scattered left and center, a Republican administration is more than ever a
conservative turnkey project.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney gathered a team of technocrats,
centrist Republicans, even some Democrats. “He sought competence,
experience and creativity and gave less weight to politics or ideology,”
recalled Scott Helman, a veteran Romney-watcher for The Boston Globe. “But
that was then,” he added. Yes, that was a different time, a different
place, a different Romney.

It’s possible President Romney would prefer to convene an administration of
deal-cutters and problem-solvers. The trusted aides expected to help him
organize the West Wing — former Senator Jim Talent of Missouri; Mike
Leavitt, former governor of Utah; former Bain Capital partner Bob White;
and Beth Myers, who was Romney’s chief of staff in Massachusetts — are more
managers than firebrands.

The question is whether anything short of hyperpartisanship is possible for
a Republican leader in today’s Washington. At the national level, moderate
Republicans are scarce and endangered. The policy factories, Congressional
stalwarts and interest groups Romney will need to staff a government have
been ideologically purified and politically schooled, and are mostly
conservatives of the uncompromising kind. President Romney will be as much
a captive of this Republican Washington as its leader. Ask John Boehner.

What follows is a sampler of what you get with a President Romney, some of
them his choices, some thrust upon him. The primary campaign pulled Romney
sharply to the right. Here are some of the forces that are likely to keep
him there.

*THE APOSTLE OF MARKETS * Ryan would have been a powerful voice in a Romney
administration even if he had not been chosen for the sidekick role — the
younger, quicker, more conviction-filled half of the ticket. His manifesto
for lower tax rates<http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2012/04/09/120409ta_talk_surowiecki>and
severe cuts in nonmilitary spending has become his party’s master
plan,
a brutal alternative to the recommendations of the bipartisan
Simpson-Bowles fiscal reform commission (which Ryan participated in, then
voted against because it included tax hikes). Ryan gets demonized as a guy
who wants to privatize the safety net, and not without reason. President
Obama decried Ryan’s plan for Medicare vouchers as “social Darwinism”; even
Newt Gingrich called it “right-wing social
engineering<http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/05/newt-gingrich-blasts-gop-budget-as-right-wing-social-engineering.php>.”
Ryan has tempered some of the more radical aspects of his plan, and the
other day he told me he regards it as the basis of a bipartisan “adult
conversation,” not the last word. (Ryan is, like Obama, the kind of
self-confident politician who will call a critical columnist if he sees a
scrap of common ground.) “We have consensus within both parties and in the
country that health security is a mission of the federal government,” he
said in a phone call from Wisconsin. But make no mistake, Ryan embodies a
philosophy that most public needs — even such sensitive needs as health
care and retirement security — are better served with a lot less government
and a lot more trust in the dubious mercies of the marketplace.

*THE HAWK* On foreign policy, Romney has so far largely bypassed his
party’s mainstream in favor of advisers with a decidedly neoconservative
bent — confrontational, unilateral, with a missionary urge to spread
American-style democracy and a particular affinity for Israel’s
hard-liners. Romney’s more conventional insiders call it the “Bolton
faction,” for John Bolton, among the most hawkish of George W. Bush’s
“freedom agenda” interventionists. Bolton is now on the Romney team, but
Dan Senor is the one who has Romney’s ear. At 40, he is next-gen Bolton,
smoother, TV-savvy, post-cold war in age but cold war in spirit. (He co-founded
a think tank <http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/> with the Soviet-era neocon
William Kristol.) Senor helped choreograph Romney’s recent foreign debut,
in which the candidate needlessly offended the
British<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/27/mitt-romney-gaffe-strewn-london>and
the
Palestinians<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/us/politics/romney-angers-palestinians-with-comments-in-israel.html>.
You might think that gaffe-a-thon would be a career setback, but Senor has
survived bigger debacles. He was the spin-doctor for L. Paul Bremer, who,
as the American proconsul of post-conquest Iraq, presided over the most
highhanded and blundering stage of the occupation.

*THE ORIGINALIST * Appointing 85-year-old Robert Bork as co-chairman of his
Justice Advisory Committee sent a clear message to the right: The Supreme
Court will be all yours. Bork is the original originalist, champion of the
doctrine that says the Constitution does not adapt to changes in society,
spiritual father of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. A Reagan Supreme
Court nominee, he was attacked (with justification) as a radical and denied
confirmation; to conservatives he is a martyr and an oracle.
Temperamentally, Romney might be tempted to nominate someone in the
slightly less doctrinaire mold of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. But to the
hard core, Roberts is tarnished by his ruling in support of Obama’s health
care plan. As my friend the expert court-watcher Linda Greenhouse puts it,
“I think we can assume without fear of being tendentious that Romney would
go as far to the right as the base wants and the Senate would permit.”

*THE TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMIST* R. Glenn Hubbard <http://www.glennhubbard.net/>,
who has been a top Romney adviser since the 2008 campaign, is a reputable
economist, dean of Columbia Business School. He is not one of those
abolish-the-Fed, tax-cuts-pay-for-themselves charlatans who seem to have
captured the minds of so many Republicans. But he has increasingly traded
in his economic science for partisan politics. As chairman of George W.
Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, Hubbard rationalized huge tax cuts
(the promised bonanza of jobs failed to materialize) and deregulation
(widely blamed for contributing to the housing and banking mess). Now he
lends an expert gloss to the claim that Romney’s sketchy economic
plan<http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2012/08/mitt-romneys-plan-stronger-middle-class01>will
create 12 million jobs — a claim I doubt would pass muster in a
first-year Econ class at Columbia.

*THE MOGUL CHORUS* The traditional euphemism in Washington is that money
doesn’t buy influence; it just buys access. Whatever you call it, Romney’s
mega-donors, who have their individual pet issues and a shared loathing of
regulations of any kind, will not be settling for sleepovers in the Lincoln
Bedroom. Sheldon Adelson (casinos and Israel), Charles and David Koch
(petroleum and libertarian politics) and Bob
Perry<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/us/politics/22perry.html>(home
builder and bankroller of the Swift Boat slander) will not be taking
cabinet jobs. But don’t expect to see a secretary of commerce or energy or
a director of the Environmental Protection Agency (if any of those
positions still exist) or any other key regulator who does not pass muster
with Romney’s big investors, or does not take their phone calls.

*THE TEAM OF RIVALS* Just as Obama recruited Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden
into his administration, a victorious Romney would reach out to Sarah
Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain ... just kidding! Santorum
does have a speaking slot at the convention, and he needs a job (secretary
of health and human services would be a horrifying sop to social
conservatives), but the Republican also-rans are most likely to play the
role of visible and ornery watchdogs. I expect their only personal contact
with President Romney would be in the green room at Fox News.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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