Mag issue OCT 15, 2012, VOL. 18, NO. 05 • BY WILLIAM KRISTOL
nutshell
• Romney was willing to argue morality, not just money. His argument on the deficit was made on behalf of future generations against the self-indulgence of the present one. Romney didn’t quote Edmund Burke, but he might have: Society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Romney claimed his Burkean reform conservatism isn’t only more prudent than Obama’s baby boomer self-indulgent liberalism. It’s also more just.
• Romney made the case against raising taxes because doing so would undermine economic growth. Romney has spoken a lot during the campaign about jobs and about small business creating jobs—but now he nodded to the broader Reaganite case for economic growth as key to our general social well-being.
• Romney promised to repeal Obama-care—the example of expensive and intrusive big government social engineering, hostility to which triggered the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican sweep of 2010. No amount of propaganda and browbeating has made Obama’s signature legislation any more popular today than it was then. But the repeal of Obama-care had been strangely absent from Romney’s advertising, and not emphasized in his core message. No longer, one trusts.
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