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If Mitt Romney in his Michigan speech today lied about the recent past, it’s nothing compared to the big lie he keeps telling about his own plan for the immediate future.
This is a time for new ideas, new answers and a new direction. That is the only way that our future can be better than the past.
Let me describe some of the policies of that new direction. I will be discussing these throughout this campaign.
I will improve healthcare by getting it to work more like a consumer market, and I will repeal and replace Obamacare. Individuals will be able to buy their own health insurance policies, either through their employer or directly. And the kind of competition we see in everything from auto insurance to cell phones to broadband will finally slow the growth of healthcare costs.
I will improve schools and universities and colleges with greater choice, greater accountability, and greater application of the technologies that have transformed so much of our economy.
I will help usher in a revival in American manufacturing. If we take an entirely new and different direction in energy, in trade, and in labor policies, we will see more manufacturing jobs come back to America than those that are leaving America. I am absolutely convinced that with the right policies and leadership we can see a resurgence in American manufacturing.
New and emerging small businesses and so-called gazelle, or fast-growing, businesses will spring up across the country by instituting pro-growth regulations, pro-growth taxes, pro-growth intellectual property protections, and pro-growth labor policies.
There are little lies scattered through this litany, empty as it is of specifics. My favorite is his claim that it’s easy to control health care costs through competition, which is presumaby a reference to his championship of the conservative pet rock of interstate insurance sales. It might well bring down insurance premiums for people healthy enough to be the object of all that competition, but for everyone else, it could make the status quo much, much worse, destroying existing state regulations that protect access to health insurance and seek to provide some parity in rates, as companies gratefully migrate to states that let them do whatever they want.
But let’s get to the big lie: all this talk about newness. As Greg Sargent observes:
The big danger for Obama is the possibility that swing voters will accept the basic premise of Romney’s candidacy — that his success in the private sector shows he possesses basic leadership qualities and a talent for turning around troubled enterprises that can be applied to a whole country. Obama’s rebuttal is that Romney amounts to more than whatever aura of competence he manages to project; he is offering a set of policies, priorities, and ideas about the economy that we’ve already tried and that have already failed.
Romney’s big speech today was all about obscuring this. In addition to repeatedly proclaiming his approach is unlike anything we’ve tried before, he repeatedly claimed that Obama is the candidate who embodies the failed policies of the past — an effort to muddy the waters around what is increasingly becoming the central argument of the campaign.
I don’t know about you, but the only specific Bush administration policy I’ve heard Romney reject on the campaign trail this year is comprehensive immigration reform. Is encouraging undocumented workers to “self-deport” the secret to all this exciting economic activity Mitt is projecting as the payoff for supporting his policies? And has he ever specifically repudiated the recent comment of an RNC spokesperson that his economic policies are just an “updated version” of W.’s?
It’s a long way to November, and there ought to be some opportunity for enterprising reporters to ask Romney point-blank: “What economic policies of the George W. Bush administration would you not wish to reimpose?” It’s not like this was going to come up during the GOP primaries, since hhis rivals were as complicit as he is in the big lie that somehow Bush had nothing to do with the financial crash or the recession, and/or that it was his ill-defined “big government” heresies that were the problem. Mitt needs to be challenged on this regularly, until he finally comes up with something genuinely new or shuts up about it or just admits his campaign is a straight-up Restoration.
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Daniel Kim on May 08, 2012 6:24 PM:
"Individuals will be able to buy their own health insurance policies, either through their employer or directly."
Dang! What an innovation! I mean, it's revolutionary, this idea that individuals can buy their own insurance policies. We've never been able to do that before!
Joe Friday on May 08, 2012 6:36 PM:
What's really shocking is that (at least by the polls) a majority of Americans think Willard has better ideas on how to fix the economy. After what we just went through and remain mired in, exactly WHAT does it take for this repeatedly failed RightWing economic agenda to be discredited ?
delNorte on May 08, 2012 7:10 PM:
Reading the text quoted here, Romney must have college interns writing this crud. Even prior to Romney's robotic delivery, this speech is dull, unfocused, generic, and does more to obscure than enlighten.
Perhaps that's what his speech writers were going for. If so, it seems they have absolutely no respect for their audience, and are playing them as fools and idiots.
exlibra on May 08, 2012 7:43 PM:
[...] opportunity for enterprising reporters [...] -- Ed Kilgore
Huh? Everyone is "enterprising" in front of his bathroom mirror but, otherwise? Those who are enterprising (some of the best bloggers) don't get face time, nationally. Those who do, OTOH, sold their "enterprise" for multi-million-dollar contracts.
DCSusie on May 08, 2012 7:53 PM:
Would SO love to see someone ask Mittens what steps he and the Mrs. took to find the most cost effective care for her MS and breasted cancer.
jeri on May 08, 2012 9:12 PM:
Uh Huh. Following time-honored advertising practices, Mr. businessman Romney is peddling NEW! IMPROVED! Republican agenda.
I'm not impressed.
TCinLA on May 08, 2012 9:38 PM:
I will improve healthcare by getting it to work more like a consumer market, and I will repeal and replace Obamacare. Individuals will be able to buy their own health insurance policies, either through their employer or directly. And the kind of competition we see in everything from auto insurance to cell phones to broadband will finally slow the growth of healthcare costs.
Insurance will be marketed interstate and just as the credit card companies moved to the lowest-regulated states, so will health insurance.
I will improve schools and universities and colleges with greater choice, greater accountability, and greater application of the technologies that have transformed so much of our economy.
I'll reduce the faculty-student ratio by reducing the number of students who go to these schools.
I will help usher in a revival in American manufacturing. If we take an entirely new and different direction in energy, in trade, and in labor policies, we will see more manufacturing jobs come back to America than those that are leaving America. I am absolutely convinced that with the right policies and leadership we can see a resurgence in American manufacturing.
We'll kill the minimum wage and outlaw unions and get rid of all that crazy legislation about an 8-hour day and ending the opportunity of children to help their families by becoming part of the workforce. You'll all be just as happy as any Nike worker in Jakarta.
New and emerging small businesses and so-called gazelle, or fast-growing, businesses will spring up across the country by instituting pro-growth regulations, pro-growth taxes, pro-growth intellectual property protections, and pro-growth labor policies.
No taxes, no regulations, no unions, no social legislation, no environmental rules, and we'll continue the Mickey Mouse Copyright activity into the next millenium.
Donald Ball on May 08, 2012 9:49 PM:
He's citing cellphone and broadband as evidence in favor of functioning competitive markets driving down prices for the consumer? Is... he.... is... I don't even know what to say.
boatboy_srq on May 09, 2012 8:19 AM:
And the kind of competition we see in everything from auto insurance to cell phones to broadband...
I'm with Donald Ball. This one statement puts the lie to his entire speech.
The auto insurance industry? Who are they to tell a good driver that a car worth half of another is costly enough to insure that the more expensive one winds up cheaper to own? If Romney wants "innovation" then he needs to keep the insurers out of the design process in Detroit; half the reason all the Soccer Moms bought SUVs was because they were cheap to insure (ruinous to run, but cheap to insure). This is not a model for the design process we want to encourage.
As for the cellphone and broadband "markets" in the US (being near-monopolies), they're why Americans pay 10x what most other countries' citizens do for the same services. If this is the kind of "efficiency through free markets and competition" Romney intends, then we have yet one more reason to call him an idiot - and one more reason to call out that "efficiency" for what it is: fraud.
sick-n-effn-tired. on May 09, 2012 8:37 AM:
@ Donald Ball
You said it . There is a man who has never written a check to a cell phone , cable, broadband or utility company in his life. They only go up .
I guess the "help" have always taken care of that minor stuff.
zandru on May 09, 2012 11:14 AM:
"ask Romney point-blank"
... Because then he, like, wouldn't lie to them?
No, I'm for the fictional Murphy Brown style of accusation, defense, fact-check; rinse and repeat, until the little red light on the camera goes off or the subject flees the set.
Truly, this form of journalism was essentially dead by the time Murphy Brown aired. You can't just "ask the hard questions", you have to question about specifics, challenge any assertions, cut through filibuster attempts, and try to bring out the truth - even if you know your interviewee will NEVER tell it himself.
It's for the viewers, the voters, the public.
W.R. German on May 10, 2012 5:52 AM:
Bullshit Mitt is bankrupt when it comes to ideas on running America.
There isn't enough money in the world to convince me to vote for him.