Which brings us to Mitt’s audacity on taxes: What can Obama reply when Romney says, as he now does, that he’ll insist that his reforms end up both revenue and distributionally neutral, so that we’re simply getting the supposed growth benefit from lower marginal rates, especially for small business? The president can call him a flip flopper or mathematically challenged, or assert that it can’t work without taking on sacred cows like the mortgage interest deduction and the tax exemption for employer-provided health benefits, but so long as Romney has Marty Feldstein and other respected economists saying it’s theoretically possible, as a political matter, it’s likely a draw. (The truth is that Romney originally proposed cutting taxes only for middle income earners who would “suffered most in the Obama economy,” before he decided in the primaries to sign on to bolder conservative tax theology to win, so this may in fact be a return to an emphasis Romney actually “believes in” – to the extent that this is an intelligible concept.)
Romney’s critics — including me — are often frustrated that he’s been laughably inconsistent on policy over time. But, as I’ve argued before, from his point of view this criticism really doesn’t matter. Romney’s not trying to win a prize from pundits for coherence or consistency. He’s trying to win the power of the presidency. Actual consistency — as opposed to the appearance of having certain guiding principles — has surprisingly little relevance when it comes to getting to 50 percent plus one. Just ask Ronald Reagan, who pragmatically raised taxes multiple times as both governor and president while winning elections and retaining his reputation as an anti-tax crusader.
Matt Miller
A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the host of the new podcast “This...Is Interesting,” Miller writes a weekly column for The Post.
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Mitt Romney opens a door for the “47 percent”.
Yet taxes were the most striking of the president’s many failures Wednesday to draw contrasts that would have rightly made Romney look unattractive. Amazingly, Obama failed to dramatize the injustice of Romney’s desire to exempt wealthy individuals like himself from any participation in the inevitable fiscal adjustment the country faces. He made the point feebly that Romney wouldn’t go for even a 10 to 1 spending cut to tax hike deal, and tossed out a weird line about Donald Trump, but he didn’t hammer home the insanity and immorality of constantly cutting taxes on high earners when we’ve been at war for a decade and now need to pay for the boomers’ costly retirement.
Indeed, if I were advising Romney, I’d say that atop tonight’s performance, if Romney said he’d be open to top earners bearing a greater tax burden as part of broader changes that get our long term fiscal house in order, he’d knock out the single most indefensible policy choice that lets Democrats brand him justly as nefarious. He must have reasons for not doing this, but with Romney, who knows what’s coming? Maybe in the next debate he’ll say he’s thought it over and that people like him may need to pay something more, and he’ll score big with independent voters.
Obama’s other striking omission was his failure to slam the Republican Congress for its failure to cooperate on what was essentially a Republican-style health reform. Again, the president hit the point once, but feebly. He left Romney looking like a leader who could pass a major health reform on a bipartisan basis, and Obama as lacking the chops to do the same in Washington. That’s unfair to Obama — as in the first years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Republicans were determined in 2009 and 2010 to do everything in their power to foil major health reform or to gain politically if it passed. But Obama failed completely to articulate this reality for the viewing audience.
It’s hard to know what the president or his team were thinking Wednesday night. Maybe those who said it is a rattling experience for any president used to sycophants to be confronted in public by a forceful critic were right: This throws a man off his game. Maybe the campaign figured its ads could do the dirty work while Obama took the high road while on stage. But whatever Team Obama thought before Wednesday night, it’s about to change. Because based on the first debate, it’s a recipe for defeat.
Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a contributor to MSNBC. His e-mail address is mattino2@gmail.com.
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