To some degree, I regret not having blogging during the fiscal cliff negotiations.  They may, to be sure, represent a low point for congressional Republicans, but they may also represent a turning point.  The once-divided House Republicans emerged unified from their Williamsburg retreat.  And Congress has now disposed of one of the few issues Obama emphasized in the campaign — and demagogued after his victory — increasing taxes on the wealthy.

He will not longer be able to use that issue (i.e., “tax the rich) against Republicans as effectively as he did in the campaign.  And he now gives Republicans a chance to remind Americans about the second part of his “balanced approach” to deficit reduction: spending cuts.

Las Friday, we learned that despite his successful reelection campaign, President Obama does not have the power he needs to “fundamentally” transform the nation as he would like.  The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the incumbent’s attempt at constitutional overreach, striking down his use “the Constitution’s recess appointment power to make appointments despite the absence of a recess” to appoint members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)

This ruling will make it relatively easy for employers to challenge all the pro-union rulings the NLRB has made since Obama announced the appointments.  The Democrat cannot willy nilly put policies into place increasing regulation and giving more power to favored special interests.

And despite a largely favorable press, Obama’s current approval rating hovers just below that of George W. Bush at a similar point in his term, indeed, as George Will observed, the Democrat enjoys “the lowest approval rating (according to Gallup, 50 percent, four points lower than that of the National Rifle Association) of any reelected president when inaugurated since World War II”, with the eminent pundit opining that the incumbent’s “contradictory agenda [is] certain to stimulate a conservative revival.” (more…)

Our frequent contributor ILoveCapitalism penned the post below which I cut and paste without altering a word (or link).  These are his words–not mine or Bruce’s.

A few weeks ago, a piece on Bloomberg looked at the question of whether government spending cuts hurt the economy. (Hat tip: Hot Air) First, the authors remind us that a large public debt saps economic growth:

In a paper released this year, economists Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff said that periods of debt overhang — when accumulated gross [ed: public] debt exceeds 90 percent of a country’s total economic activity for five or more consecutive years — reduce annual economic growth by more than one percentage point for decades.

Over 20 years, the authors write, there can be a “massive cumulative output loss” that reduces gains by 25 percent or more. The U.S. went over the 90 percent threshold after the 2008 financial crisis…

To grow robustly, the U.S. must reduce that debt overhang. But that would mean genuine spending cuts: large enough to give us a budget surplus. And that would cause a recession, right? Maybe not:

In the 1990s, Canada, for instance, reduced debt-to-GDP ratios through an aggressive combination of actual, year-over- year spending cuts and higher taxes. The result wasn’t malaise but a burst in activity.

The same happened in the U.S. right after World War II. In 1944 and 1945, annual government spending (in 2005 dollars) averaged about $1 trillion and represented more than 40 percent of GDP. By 1947, it had plummeted to $345 billion in 2005 dollars and 14 percent of GDP. Even facing the demobilization of millions of soldiers, the economy soared and unemployment fell despite almost universal fears that the opposite would happen.

Such outcomes are not flukes. Research by economists Alberto F. Alesina and Silvia Ardagna underscored that fiscal adjustments achieved through spending cuts rather than tax increases are less likely to cause recessions, and, if they do, the slowdowns are mild and short-lived.

…[especially] when spending reductions are accompanied by policies such as the liberalization of trade and labor markets…

Read the whole thing; they cite more examples of countries who achieved growth through government-cutting measures, like Sweden, or the UK in the 1990s. There are still more examples, which they didn’t cite: the UK in the 1980s (where Thatcher’s spending cuts enabled an economic boom), the U.S. in the early 1920s (where Harding’s spending cuts did likewise), and more. (more…)

Readers of this blog know that I have long been a fan of Jeb Bush, having favored the accomplished former Florida Governor as my candidate for 2012 at least since November 2010.

And while it is still too early to start planning for 2016, when you google that good man’s name, look at what comes up:

Our reader Kyle alerted me to an article that shows that Jeb understands an aspect of modern American conservatism that Mitt Romney failed to articulate.  ”Jeb Bush,” writes Mark Silva . . .

. . . the former Florida governor who based a political career on school reform, today called for a “restoration” of lost American values and economic mobility based on educational accountability.

With the gap between the impoverished and privileged in the U.S. widening, the solution lies in a regime of school and teacher evaluation, national standards and more “school choice” in alternatives such as charter schools, he said.

“We have these huge gaps in income,” Bush said at the start of a two-day Washington conference sponsored by his Foundation for Excellence in Education, “with people born into poverty who will stay in poverty.” He said: “This ideal of who we are as a nation — it’s going away, it’s leaving us,” adding: “There is one path that can change this course.”

Emphasis added.  Economic mobility, his belief that people born in poverty, reared in dependency, don’t have to stay in that condition and can rise about their circumstances.

It frustrated many Reagan-Kemp conservatives when, right after the Florida primary, Mitt Romney said because of the “safety net,” he wasn’t concerned about the very poor.

Reagan conservatives, however, have long been concerned about the poor because that safety net sometimes traps them in a cycle of dependency.   And we want to create the opportunities that will help them find the means to move up into a better economic situation. (more…)

“The president,” wrote Jennifer Rubin yesterday, “who ran with no agenda and is now a lame duck, has not distinguished himself by tackling tough problems.” His reelection campaign made his, as his campaign manager put it, the party of “the micro stuff“.

(Perhaps Mitt Romney would have won last week had he been better at articulating the bigger picture.)

WIth such a small ball focus, Obama doesn’t seem willing to address the big challenges facing our country, notably the coming insolvency of entitlements, out-of-control federal spending and the increasing burdens of the regulatory state.

Last Thursday, Glenn linked a piece suggesting he has no interest in tackling these problems:

The sound and fury will be over big fights on taxes and spending. They will look like replays of the last four years and not end up accomplishing much. The big changes to our economy will be the metastatic expansion of regulation, let by ACA, Dodd-Frank, and EPA. There will be no change on our long run problems: entitlements, deficits or fundamental reform of our chaotic tax system. 4 more years, $4 trillion more debt.

Why? I think this follows inevitably from the situation: normal (AFU). Nothing has changed. The President is a Democrat, now lame duck. The congress is Republican. The Senate is asleep. Congressional Republicans think the President is a socialist. The President thinks Congressional Republicans are neanderthals. The President cannot compromise on the centerpieces of his campaign.

Result: we certainly are not going to see big legislation. Anything new will happen by executive order or by regulation.

Read the whole thing. And this is what is truly sad.  We need real reform right now, big changes to address fiscal problems looming beyond the cliff.  We have a debt problem.  And a regulatory problem.  And yet now we have an administration committed to moving us in the opposite direction, writing ever more regulations and increasing the costs of compliance to job creators. (more…)

Seems laws President Obama opposes may have helped secure the Democrat’s reelection.  At his American Enterprise Institute blog, Carpe Diem, University of Michigan economics professor Mark J. Perry reminds us that the incumbent opposes right-to-work laws, legislation which “protect employees from being fired for refusal to pay union dues or fees”.

States which such laws on the books

were responsible for 72% of all net household job growth across the U.S. from June 2009 through September 2012.  If these states’ job increase had been no better than the 0.85% experienced by forced-unionism states as a group, the nationwide job increase would have been less than half as great.  And the President wouldn’t have been able even to pretend the economy was in recovery.

Aggregate household employment grew by 1.86 million jobs in the 22 states with right-to-work laws.  2.59 million jobs created in the nation during that period.  And that number is even more impressive when you consider that the states without right-to-work laws include some with the largest population like California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan. (more…)

As careful readers of this blog know, I had wanted former Florida Governor Jeb Bush to enter the 2012 contest for the White House.  Perhaps the Democrats would have run against him as the scion of the Bush dynasty.

He had been, however, a successful reform-minded governor of a major state, has withstood a fierce partisan challenge in 2002 and successfully reached out to Hispanic voters.  Perhaps, Jeb had (at least politically) a lousy last name, but I feared, as Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel put it, in their election post-mortem, that Mitt Romney’s

. . . biography hurt him. During a cycle when voters remained angry at Wall Street, Romney bore the weight of a finance background. And because of his own history in Massachusetts, he could never effectively go after President Obama on Obamacare, the president’s biggest political weakness.

None of this was ever a secret, but the Republicans nominated Romney anyway. They had no choice. The alternatives were unacceptable.

Exactly.  The remaining alternatives all carried more baggage that Mitt did.  Democrats were able to define him as a out-of-touch plutocrat rather than a real reformer.  (And I do wonder if some Republicans stayed home because they didn’t think the man who signed Romneycare into law was committed to repealing Obamacare.)

Anyway, Carlson and Patel wrote a great piece–one that I highly recommend.  They help define what kind of candidates Republicans need to nominate if they are to win elections.

We need, as they put it, “genuine conservatives . . . with political skills, policy smarts and impressive resumes in order to get elected.”  Fortunately, it seems, the two freshman Republican Senators are cut from that cloth.

May we see more of their like in 2014.

“When Bush left office,” Tim Stanley writes in the Telegraph,

. . . unemployment was 7.8 per cent; today it is 7.9 per cent. Debt is up, food stamps are up, income is stagnant. Bush bailed out Wall Street and so did Obama – even Obama’s much vaunted “rescue” of the auto industrywas actually kick started by Bush. If Bush suffocated civil liberties with the Patriot Act, Obama blew them to Kingdom Come with that awful kill list.

In many ways, the policies and performances of Obama and Bush are rather similar. There are some differences. First, Obama accelerated big government trends that he inherited from W – debt as a percentage of GDP is way, way up.

(Via Sarah Hoyt @ Instapundit.) After citing the parties’ “cultural” differences, Stanley concludes that both W and Obama are New Dealers:  ”If Bush was Roosevelt Lite, Obama was Roosevelt Max Strength.”  Only problem is “that the moment when the hardcore Roosevelt fans finally got the keys to the candy store was the exact moment when it had run out of candy.”

Simply put, all that government spending had depleted the Treasury.

And Obama never asked the American people to pay for all the “candy” he wants to shower upon them.  He filled up our shopping carts with items he, to borrow an expression, just “didn’t pay for.”  He only talked about raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, tax hikes which would barely put a dent in the deficit.  He didn’t ask other Americans to pay their fair share for programs designed to benefit them.

Although Obama promised four years ago to change politics as we know it, the only real change he has offered has been to accelerate the pace of government spending.  ”The Romney/Paul [sic] ticket”, has, by contrast, Stanley offers, seemed to grasp “that America simply cannot continue the way it is going. (more…)

On the abstraction notion of “gay rights” (turning to the government to craft gay-specific policies), the Democratic Party has long been superior to the GOP, but  it terms of supporting a broad spectrum of policies which benefit gay individuals, the Republican Party is head and shoulders above the president’s party.  Simply put, small government policies favor all Americans, including gay Americans.

We don’t need gay-specific legislation.  We just need the government to stay out of our lives.

Less government intrusion in our lives means we have more freedom to direct our own lives.  It means entrepreneurs, including gay and lesbian business owners, will find it easier to establish, maintain and build their enterprises.  Individuals will have greater choices.

And not just gay- and lesbian-owned enterprises.  We have seen how quickly private corporations have responded to social change, offering benefits to the same-sex partners of employees and adopting policies banning discrimination in their workplaces.

Today, our friend Jimmy LaSalvia, the Executive Director of GOProud, takes up that theme in a piece at the Daily Caller, arguing that gay Americans should vote for Mitt Romney:

Governor Romney supports cutting taxes for middle-income Americans and simplifying our overly complex tax code. Unlike President Obama, Governor Romney understands that the last thing we need in this troubled economic environment is higher taxes.

Romney has a plan to make American companies more competitive by lowering corporate tax rates, opening new markets to U.S. goods through new free trade agreements and reducing bureaucratic red tape by eliminating unnecessary and unworkable federal regulations.

Gay Americans, like all Americans, are suffering under Obama’s big government policies.  Drive along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood and note the number of storefronts with “For Rent” or “Available” signs decorating their otherwise empty display windows.

How many gay-owned businesses have gone under because the cost to comply with federal regulations was too great for hard-working entrepreneurs?  Mitt Romney knows what it’s like to build and sustain and enterprise.  His policies will help remove the barriers to entry that now make it difficult for creative individuals with a good idea and a little bit of capital to turn that idea into a business — allowing them to realize their dream while creating jobs for others.

* (more…)

WIth word yesterday that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will now focus more on policy specifics, Jim Geraghty suggested the issues he should have hit yesterday to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce:

Do Hispanic businessman want to hear about deficit reduction, Medicare, and reducing the size of the federal workforce? Wouldn’t this be a good place to talk up building the Keystone pipeline, ensuring that federal regulations don’t strangle the economic boom stemming from fracking, and tax simplification, and to make a full-throated denunciation of a Washington culture of crony capitalism, where who you know is more important than how well you can do a job?)

Now, to be sure, Romney has already given the speech, but Jim did provide a nice rund0wn of the key issues on the conservative agenda which would promote economic growth and create jobs.

Last night, after having dinner with a friend, we ended up, pursuant to part of our conversation, watching the first half of Excalibur, a flawed, but very (very, very) watchable movie.  As a result, I missed the two “big” speeches at the Republican National Convention last night.

When I did scan the web last night, I learned that conservative bloggers andpundits, while almost unanimous in loving Ann Romney’s speech, had mixed views on Chris Christie’s.  Byron York thought the New Jersey governor’s address did not succeed. Jonah Goldberg called it “a mild disappointment.”

Jennifer Rubin and John Podhoretz liked the speech, with the latter citing the governor’s failure to attack the incumbent indicated instead a suggestion

. . . that the electorate in November would turn to the Republican ticket because it understands better than politicians the depth of the country’s problems — and that only the Republicans would speak honestly about them and the need to change course before it’s too late.

Perhaps, the reason Christie highlighted his own record was to show that understanding and that even thought Republican leaders in state houses across the country face incredible obstacles to reform, but are nonetheless pushing ahead with solutions to their jurisdictions’ problems.

Christie’s goal, in short, was to warm up the audience for Paul Ryan, showing that Republicans have solutions to the nation’s fiscal problems.

In the interview with the other Republican elected to replace a Democratic governor in 2009, the National Review’s Jim Geraghty asks a question which shows not just that Republican governors have championed reforms, but that reforms has helped improve the economic situation in their states: “Completely coincidental“, he quips “that all of Obama’s national policies are only working in those Republican states, huh?”  (I.e., states where Republican governors have enacted real reforms.)

“What Paul Ryan brings to the ticket”, adds that governor, Virginia’s Bob McDonnell,

 is a seriousness about the incredible challenges facing America. (more…)

Back in the 1990s, nearly a full year lapsed between Republican Congressman and candidates signing the Contract with America and Log Cabin endorsing that document promising government reform.  The prominence Republicans gave to the Contract returning its focus to real reform and fiscal responsibility.  Having gained such prominence from attacking the GOP in 1992, the then-leadership of the ostensibly Republican organization was wary of embracing the GOP, even when it was not focusing on social issues.

How thing have changed.  Two days after presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney announced his selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, the current Executive Director of Log Cabin, wrote in the Daily Caller that

Congressman Paul Ryan is a strong choice for vice president, and his addition to the GOP ticket will help Republican candidates up and down the ballot. As chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of the Republican “Path to Prosperity,” nobody is more qualified to articulate a conservative economic vision to restore the American economy and stimulate job creation.

Unfortunately, Cooper used his opinion piece to make the case for statist legislation, but the fact remains that he has openly embraced the “conservative economic vision” that Ryan has promoted.  He even indicated on Facebook that he “liked” Paul Ryan for VP:

Clarke’s willingness to champion Republican politicians like Ryan and real conservative reforms has served to distinguish him from some of his predecessors. And Clarke is not the only right-of-center gay leader to herald Romney’s pick. Shortly after the Republican announced his choice, GOProud’s Executive Director Jimmy LaSalvia called Ryan “a bold and inspired pick“: (more…)

I have collected a great variety of links to and selected quotations from a number of blog posts and opinion pieces (as well as taken a number of notes) to I posted I’ve been planning in which I would (as I detailed yesterday) contest the “‘conventional wisdom’ . . . that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate all but dooms the GOP ticket to certain defeat this fall.”

All that collection and selection, however, may not really have been necessary.  Earlier today, I found that Michael Gerson had effectively said what I had intended to say in his op-ed on Monday:

The Republican ticket will go large, arguing that budgetary indiscipline creates uncertainty that undermines current growth, while eventually leading to fiscal crisis and economic catastrophe. This is a more complex argument than “economy, bad.” It is also more likely to yield a governing mandate, which seems to be Romney’s admirable, unexpected goal.

In the fight Romney has picked, Ryan is an advantage. He is the best policy thinker and best communicator among the rising generation of conservative reformers. He combines a sober realism about a teetering, unsustainable entitlement system with a bubbly, Jack Kemp-like belief in the promise of unleashed enterprise. (We both worked for Kemp at the same time in the 1990s.) Unlike a recent Republican vice presidential nominee, you can’t put him on the spot. He is informed, levelheaded and persuasive. And he is already Barack Obama’s most persistent, effective economic critic.

Emphasis added.  Unlike the previous Republican vice presidential nominee, Paul Ryan is adept at dealing with the national media and well-versed in the details of federal policy.  He doesn’t need a crash course in the issues of the current campaign. (more…)

Today, in his Morning Jolt newsletter (available by subscription), Jim Geraghty links Guy Benson’s piece about the Democratic National Committee Chairman’s appearance on Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room.  Benson asks the question that anyone should ask Democrats who criticize Paul Ryan for his plan to reform Medicare and Mitt Romney for tapping the Wisconsin Republican as his running mate:

When Blitzer asks her to specify exactly how current or soon-to-be seniors would be impacted by the GOP plan, she cannot.  Because they’re not.  The Left is intellectually bankrupt on the very subject they claim will allow them to crush Mitt Romney in November.  They despise the bipartisan solution Republicans have offered, but they have no alternative of their own.  Dear Democrats, Medicare is slated to go bankrupt in 2024.  You say it’s wrong for future seniors to be denied Medicare as it currently exists.  Okay, what’s your plan, guys?  We know that your actions have already cut Medicare by $700 Billion to pay for part of Obamacare.  We also know that Obamacare establishes a government panel to ration care for the elderly.  And yet the 2024 deadline is still coming.  Again, what’s your plan, Democrats?  Mr. President?  Anyone? 

Emphasis added.  Writing about the “Blitzer dissection of Wasserman Schultz”, Jennifer Rubin wonders if others in the media are catching on to Democratic demagoguery on the Ryan reforms: (more…)

“Liberals“, Mary Katharine Ham observes echoing a point heard round the blogosphere, “are positively gleeful that Romney has picked someone whose positions they can gleefully demagogue. But there’s another sense, even among national political reporters, that Team Obama should be careful what it wishes for.”

They should be careful particularly because Paul Ryan is, in many ways, the exact opposite of Barack Obama.  To be sure, they are both relatively young men who are intelligent and speak well.

Mr. Obama, however, gained acclaim not for the policy proposals he authored nor the reforms he had championed, but instead for the words he spoke and the image he projected.  The Democrat earned the affection of liberals by his successful creation of that image, the reformer who would stand up to entrenched interests and end politics as usual.  He just didn’t specify how he would accomplish all that nor could he point  to actual entrenched interests he had challenged or political systems he had changed.

The Democratic glee comes from the fact that Ryan is quite the opposite of Mr. Obama, having staked out clearly the kinds of policy proposals he favors and the reforms, he believes, America needs in order to forestall the looming fiscal crisis.

It’s much easier to run against particular policies than it is to run against the idealized image of the change agent we have been waiting for.

In doing the hard work of translating his ideas into policies, Ryan has earned the affection of many conservatives and libertarians, including yours truly.  And that is why, to borrow Mary Katharine’s expression, Team Obama should be careful what it wishes for.  Yes, those policies may make him a target for Democrats, but they all show him to be a serious man with a plan.  And this may be the year when Americans want leaders with just such a plan.

Ryan is very much the un-Obama, a man whose success depends not on a vague promise, but on an actual record.  And with a near-stagnant economy and skyrocketing deficits, Americans may prefer Ryan’s stern substance to Obama’s lofty potential, (more…)

“Conservatives,” write the editors of the National Review announcing their support for the Ryan ticket — and offering the consensus conservative view on the selection

. . .  and not just the Romney campaign and the Republican apparatus, will have to stand ready to fight back against the distortions that are sure to come — indeed, have already begun. Democrats will say that Romney-Ryan is a ticket committed to “dismantling” Medicare (by ensuring its solvency); that it would leave the poor to fend for themselves (by extending the successful principles of welfare reform); that their only interest is to comfort the rich (whose tax breaks they wish to pare back). These are debates worth winning, and they can be won.

Indeed, the attacks and distortions have already begun.  As Democrats demonize Ryan, demagogue his proposed cuts and distort his plan, Republicans need bear in mind what one of Mitt Romney’s one-time rivals for the Republican presidential nomination once said.  In May 2011, Jon Huntsman wrote that critics of Ryan’s “approach incur a moral responsibility to propose reforms that would ensure Medicare’s ability to meet its responsibilities to retirees without imposing an unaffordable tax burden on future generations of Americans.”

Every time, Democrats and their defenders/apologists in the legacy media attack Paul Ryan, ask them to identify their plan to cut the deficit and reform entitlements.

By selecting Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has now made this election not just a referendum on Barack Obama, but also a choice between two competing visions of governing.  And the Democrats have not specified how they will pay for theirs.  When they attack, we must respond not just by defending the Ryan plan, but by attacking them for failing to put forward their own.

RELATED:  Calling Romney’s rollout of his vice-presidential selection a “Terrific debut by Paul Ryan“, Hugh Hewitt offers that (more…)

Four years ago, I was all but certain that John McCain would pick then-Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty as his running mate.  This year, I was all but certain Mitt Romney would pick Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell.

Now, as I head to bed on Friday evening, it appears the presumptive Republican nominee will be tapping the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan.

I wonder if Mr. Romney is announcing this pick nearly three weeks ahead of the party’s convention in order to change the narrative of the past three weeks, when the legacy media has helped hype the Obama narrative and put the former Massachusetts Governor on defense, keeping his own reform agenda — and the incumbent’s fiscal mess — out of the headlines.

“If indeed it’s Ryan,” offers Ed Morrissey, “even the media may have to start focusing on the most serious issues — and that’s bad news for Obama.”  As Steven Hayward puts it, “Ryan wants to have an adult conversation with America about the looming insolvency of the welfare state, and he has a serious plan to fix it.” Echoing Morrissey, Hayward adds, “Ryan knows he will face rank demagoguery from Democrats over his plan. He is not afraid of this, and in a face-to-face fight he runs circles around every single one of them.”

And Morrissey acknowledges that “Team Obama will hang Ryan’s budget on Romney,” but adds that “they were going to do that anyway”:

Why not have the man himself as the VP to explain it?  Ryan also gives the ticket solid Washington experience, while giving conservatives more hope that a Romney presidency will aim for serious change. (more…)

To win them, he should talk more regularly about the jobs he helped created while at Bain and articulate the policies he plans to implement as president to foster similar job creation.*

In one of the best pieces on what Romney needs to do as the campaign heats up, Sean Trende caught something in “the latest Pew poll“* similar to an item I caught in the NBC/WSJ survey:

by a 90 percent to 8 percent margin, registered voters say that they already pretty much know what they need to know about President Obama.

Second, by a 69 percent to 28 percent margin, these voters say that they already pretty much know what they need to know about Romney. In other words, three times as many voters are still evaluating the presumptive GOP nominee as are evaluating the president.

Third, among independents — who are almost certainly the lion’s share of those who have not yet formed a strong opinion of Romney — 42 percent say they want to know more about his record as governor, 37 percent want to know more about his record as CEO of Bain Capital, and 35 percent want to know more about his tax returns.

(Via Powerline picks)  Emphasis added.  He found that 28 percent of voters still want to know more about Mr. Romney.  Earlier today, digging into the NBC/WSJ poll, I observed that “Romney’s favorable/unfavorable underwater at 35/40 means than one-quarter of Americans still haven’t made up their minds about the presumptive Republican nominees.”  He still has a chance to sway these folks.

And no wonder the Obama team is trying to define and destroy the presumptive Republican nominee.  They want to provide a negative image of Mr. Romney’s record to that chunk of the electorate still wanting to know more about him.

Trende thinks (and I agree) that Romney needs go positive, detailing his accomplishments in the private sector and putting forward his plans for political reform and economic recovery. (more…)

“A new poll for The Hill”, reports Sheldon Alberts in that journal, “found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.”

Meanwhile “every single one” of the 17 states elected new Republican governors in November 2010 . . .

. . . has seen its unemployment rate decline since January 2011. Three of them have had unemployment drop by more than 2% (Michigan, Florida, and Nevada). The average drop in the unemployment rate in these states was 1.35%. For a comparison, in January 2011 the U.S. national unemployment rate stood at 9.1%. It is currently 8.2%, meaning that the national unemployment rate has declined by just 0.9% since then. Based on these percentages, it can be said that the job market in states with new Republican governors is improving a full 50% faster than the job market nationally.

By contrast, the “average drop in the unemployment rate in” states which elected a new Democratic governor “0.95%, approximately the same as the drop seen nationally.”  (H/t Weasel Zippers via a formerly left-leaning lesbian reader’s Facebook page.)

Wonder how much many more jobs would have been created had the president, through his big-government policies, not changed the nation for the worse.  Mr. Romney would do well to highlight some of the Republican executives’ successful policies to better contrast them with the president’s failed agenda.

With just such a contrast, the presumptive Republican nominee can help make the elecction “a referendum on the incumbent” — and his policies.  If it is just such a referendum, as Ed Morrissey writes, looking at the Hill poll, “as re-election efforts almost always are — then Obama’s going to need to keep that champagne on ice permanently.“

On FoxNews Sunday yesterday, Bill Kristol pointed to a poll which showed why Mitt Romney is lagging in the polls despite the sour economy:

“I think the Fox News poll actually has the key to what the problem is for the Mitt Romney campaign. Do you think Barack Obama has a clear plan for improving the economy or not? Yes, 41; no 53. It’s not great for an incumbent president. The economy is slow. And you are only at 41-53,” said Kristol.

“Do you think his challenger, Gov. Romney, has a clear plan for improving the economy or not? Yes, 27; No, 55,” he continued.

“I don’t think you can beat an incumbent president, even if the economy is slow, if 27 percent of the voters think you as the challenger don’t have a clear plan for improving the economy,” Kristol said.

Although Kristol tends to be a Gloomy Gus. He’s on to something here. So, just read the whole thing.

Given how close the polls are — and how high are Mr. Obama’s negatives, Romney could vault into the lead with a good one-two punch, one, fire back against the Democrat’s dishonest TV ads and two, make clear his plan for improving the economy and spell it out repeatedly at campaign stop and in TV spots.

Americans are far more familiar with Mr. Obama than they are with Mr. Romney, making it much harder for the Democrat to move his numbers.  If voters don’t think the president, after three-and-one-half years in office has a plan on the economy, there’s little he can do in the next four months to convince them he does.

Romney, however, remains unfamiliar to most voters, particularly those who have yet to tune in to the campaign.

With just over one-quarter of voters believing Romney has a clear plan for improving the economy, it’s amazing he’s running as well as he is when the economy top voters’ concerns.  Imagine how much better his numbers would be if just 40 percent of Americans thought he had a clear plan. (more…)

Earlier today, a college classmate asked me on Facebook to make the case for Mitt Romney. Among the arguments I made was that spending has skyrocketed under the incumbent president. And that same incumbent has put forward no plans to address the coming insolvency of federal entitlements.

Now comes a reports showing just how grim the picture is for our national debt, largely due to the burgeoning costs of those entitlements:

U.S. debt is on track to be nearly twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2037, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warned Tuesday.

The new CBO report states that increased entitlement spending driven by the retirement of the baby boomers and insufficient revenue is making the long-term outlook for the national debt increasingly dire.

Sifting through the CBO report, James Pethokoukis highlights its “7 scariest facts“:

The aging of the population and the rising cost of healthcare would cause spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to grow from more than 10% of GDP today to almost 16% of GDP 25 years from now, equivalent to about $850 billion today. (By comparison, CBO says, spending on all of the federal government’s programs and activities, excluding net outlays for interest, has averaged about 18.5 percent of GDP over the past 40 years.)

To address this, the National Review’s Yuval Levin contends that

Medicare spending growth must be restrained, and it can be restrained in a way that drives innovation and efficiency and continues to provide guaranteed comprehensive coverage to seniors. Paul Ryan has shown us how, and the CBO today shows us why. (more…)