David Brooks Op-Ed piece in todays NY Times is Bullcrap designed to appeal to waivering Independents
He proposes what the next four years would be if Obama or Romney is elected. His disengenousness is pretending the Right who got Romney elected would allow him to govern as a center right moderate, who would simply abandon Ryans budget plans. Furthermore, he claims that Romney's desire for re-election would force him to move to the center. Bull crap.
Romney's @ss is 65 years old now, and doesn't appear to have the stamina to endure a campaign much less 8 years of a presidency. Romney wants the presidency for the sake of having been president, and the legitimacy it will bring to the Mormon religion not that he's interested in truly governing for the next 8 years which would put him well into his seventies. After all, he wasn't even interested in hanging around to govern Massachusetts.
I think Brooks is trying to trick undecided Independents and possibly waivering Democrats, (and we know some of them exist) that Romney is an acceptable alternative to President Obama, based on a premise which is a steaming pile of bullsh!t.
"...Now let’s try to imagine the world if Mitt Romney were to win. Republicans would begin with the premise that the status quo is unsustainable. The mounting debt is ruinous. The byzantine tax and regulatory regimes are stifling innovation and growth.
Republicans would like to take the reform agenda that Republican governors have pursued in places like Indiana and take it to the national level: structural entitlement reform; fundamental tax reform. These reforms wouldn’t make government unrecognizable (we’d probably end up spending 21 percent of G.D.P. in Washington instead of about 24 percent), but they do represent a substantial shift to the right.
At the same time, Romney would probably be faced with a Democratic Senate. He would also observe the core lesson of this campaign: conservatism loses; moderation wins. Romney’s prospects began to look decent only when he shifted to the center. A President Romney would look at the way Tea Party extremism had cost the G.O.P. Senate seats in Delaware and Nevada — and possibly Missouri and Indiana.
To get re-elected in a country with a rising minority population and a shrinking Republican coalition, Romney’s shape-shifting nature would induce him to govern as a center-right moderate. To get his tax and entitlement reforms through the Democratic Senate, Romney would have to make some serious concessions: increase taxes on the rich as part of an overall reform; abandon the most draconian spending cuts in Paul Ryan’s budget; reduce the size of his lavish tax-cut promises.
As President Romney made these concessions, conservatives would be in uproar. Talk-radio hosts would be the ones accusing him of Romneysia, forgetting all the promises he made in the primary season. There’d probably be a primary challenge from the right in 2016.
But Republicans in Congress would probably go along. They wouldn’t want to destroy a Republican president. Romney would champion enough conservative reforms to allow some Republicans to justify their votes.
The bottom line is this: If Obama wins, we’ll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we’re more likely to get bipartisan reform. Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama. He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans. He’s more likely to get big stuff done."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/opinion/brooks-the-upside-of-opportunism.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0
= new reply since forum marked as read
bad stuff done.
