It’s not that the former Massachusetts governor doesn’t have ideas. It’s just that he hasn’t shared them yet.
At a lively town hall meeting here Thursday night, Romney methodically plowed through about 15 questions over the course of an hour, including one from a woman wondering whether he would continue to subsidize big oil companies if elected president.
“What I would like to see us do philosophically is to bring our [corporate] tax rates down to be competitive with the world but get rid of a lot of these special breaks that exist,” Romney answered. “We ought to look industry by industry and say, ‘Where are the lobbyists striking special deals for companies?’ Let’s get rid of that stuff and bring our rate down.”
The audience of about 300 gave him a friendly applause and Romney moved on to the next question, leaving behind a slew of unanswered questions. What would the corporate tax rate be? How does he define a “special break”? Which industry loopholes would he eliminate? And, of course, the original query: Would he continue oil subsidies?
By making the economy an almost exclusive focus of his campaign, Romney has raised the expectations for what he eventually will propose and has some policy gurus in his own party openly wondering whether the presidential front-runner has sound proposals to deal with the big problems he says he is uniquely positioned to solve.
“I think at some point he has to say more than just, ‘I’ve got 25 years experience and I’ve done it,’ ” said Steve Bell, a former top policy adviser to Senate Republicans. “Somebody’s going to say, ‘Well, what do you mean you’ve done it? ... Other than just platitudes, what specifically are you going to do to create jobs?’ ”
Bell, now a senior director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, speculated that Romney is “afraid” to offer specifics, adding: “The answers to some of these problems, if you are really rigorously honest about them, are answers that will make the tea party element of the party unhappy.”
Romney’s strategists dismiss that theory, saying he is not trying to cushion himself from scrutiny and that he will release a detailed economic plan once voters are paying closer attention. “Governor Romney will unveil his economic program and his economic policy team in the fall,” senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said.
Romney has already begun assembling a team of economic policy advisers, including: N. Gregory Mankiw, who was chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; Glenn Hubbard, who preceded Mankiw on the council and currently is dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business; and former Missouri senator Jim Talent.
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