Scott Spiegel

Much has been written about 2012 GOP presidential primary frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich’s weaknesses as candidates.

Less has been written about how they stand up next to each other, and whom the comparison favors.  A close look at their records makes it clear that Romney can only benefit from Gingrich staying in the race as long as possible.

Gingrich will likely help Romney in two ways: first, by making Romney seem more conservative to hesitant members of the Tea Party wing of the GOP.  This will happen via Gingrich’s patchwork quilt of liberal positions on such issues as Romney’s role at Bain Capital (“Exploitive!”), Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity (“Right-wing social engineering!”), and Nancy Pelosi’s cap-and-trade bill (“Bipartisan!”).

Second, Gingrich may push Romney to the right on some issues, nudging his competitor to come out more forcefully for the conservative aspects of his platform and commit to them more unwaveringly as campaign promises.

(This is in contrast to the advantage Romney gains by Ron Paul staying in the race, which is for Paul to make Romney seem like a spring chicken with a manly laugh instead of an old goat with a girlish giggle.)

Newt’s attacks on Romney from the left will help Romney develop defenses against the charges the Obama campaign will inevitably fling at him in the general election.

And positions on which Gingrich is good—for example, his promise to repeal Obamacare on his first day in office—may spur Romney to take ever bolder stances.  If you have any doubts about Romney fulfilling his oath to issue a 50-state executive waiver, Newt’s upping the ante on Obamacare will make it harder for Romney to back down.  Newt’s grandiosity, however annoying and impracticable, will prod Romney to promise and act bigger.

(Give Newt credit, I guess, for proposing too many ideas rather than too few.  It’s just that voters get suspicious when the ideas include things like giving the moon statehood.)

Newt’s arrogance and intemperance will make Romney seem even-handed and statesmanlike.  Take Newt’s petulant refusal to debate Obama in the general election if the events are moderated by “the media.”  And they say Newt won’t help build party unity!

What of Newt’s endless, reckless assaults on Romney?  Won’t they hurt Romney in voters’ eyes?  I doubt it.  Being called fickle by Newt is like being called a blowhard by Al Sharpton.

But it’s not only Newt’s venomous attacks on Romney that will drive voters to side with the former Massachusetts governor.  Newt’s pathetic justifications for his dips in the polls and poor recent debate performances belie his claim that Romney is the forked-tongue prevaricator in the race.  My favorite Newt excuse, on his Tampa debate with Romney last week, is: “I stood there thinking, ‘How can you say these things you know are falsehoods?’  That’s why I was quiet, because there was no civil way to call him out on what was in fact a series of falsehoods that were astonishing.”  Because if there’s one thing we know about Newt, it’s that he’d rather be quiet than uncivil!

Or consider this half-baked zinger, which Gingrich offered as a rationalization for why Romney would win the Florida primary: “He can bury me for a very short amount of time with four or five or six times as much money, most of it raised in Wall Street from the guys who got bailouts from the government.”

Let’s unpack this obfuscating, run-on defense, which sounds like something a Democrat would say.  Under normal circumstances, we tend to accept that candidates who raise lots of cash have many passionate supporters.  Gingrich himself has been bragging about how much cash he raised after his unexpected South Carolina victory.  Now suddenly campaign cash is bad?

“A very short amount of time” implies that Romney will best Gingrich in the polls for just a few days, maybe a few weeks—a mere blip in the unstoppable wave of his opponent’s gathering momentum.  Um, wait—doesn’t that precisely describe Gingrich’s standing?

As for Wall Street: Which former GOP Speaker of the House supported the September 2008 bank bailout?  Why, that’s right—Newt Gingrich!

Gingrich has threatened to stay in the race until the 2012 Republican National Convention in August.  I say bring it on.

Romney doesn’t give the GOP exactly what it wants as a candidate, but what he gives us is better than what any of the remaining candidates gives us—and Newt’s presence in the race makes Romney an especially appealing contrast.  Rick Santorum obsesses over social issues and is an unreliable fiscal conservative.  Ron Paul is terrible on foreign policy.  But Newt is in a category of his own: erratic and reckless, bombastic and bloviating, he alienates independents, many conservatives, and probably his own dog.



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FiveThirtyEight whiz Nate Silver recently asked whether Chris Christie is the anti-Romney or the anti-Perry.

The answer is yes.

Christie is the anti-Romney, because he genuinely and unapologetically embraces and enacts conservative policies, at least on fiscal matters—in particular entitlement reform, the most important policy realm our nation currently faces.

Critics charge that he’s not consistently conservative on issues such as global warming and gun control.  Yet Rick Perry critics complain that he’s not consistently conservative on issues such as immigration and the HPV vaccine, and most people wouldn’t call Perry a liberal.

Christie is the anti-Perry, because he knows how to identify, articulate, and justify his positions, using fiery, uncompromising rhetoric that doesn’t sound rehearsed, and isn’t afraid to say things that tick off hallowed interest groups.

Critics charge that he’s arrogant, has a temper, and insults people.  Yet his style has proven wildly popular with voters who are fed up with politicians who can’t or won’t stand up to bullying public employee unions that are bankrupting the nation’s most populous states.

If Mitt Romney held more consistently conservative positions on the major issues of the day, he’d be able to articulate them to voters.  But he doesn’t.

If Rick Perry were more articulate and had a better understanding of the issues, his positions would be conservative enough for most Republicans.  But he isn’t.

The other candidates still in the running all have their weaknesses, with most embodying one of the fatal flaws represented by frontrunners Romney and Perry.

Ron Paul is blisteringly conservative on economic issues but crazily isolationist on foreign policy, to the extent that he thinks Iran should be allowed to build nuclear weapons to defend themselves against the U.S., and to the degree that he approvingly quotes Osama bin Laden’s reasons for attacking us on 9/11.  Newt Gingrich led the Republican Revolution of 1995 and enacted welfare reform, but is prone to making insane statements such as claiming that repealing ObamaCare involves as much abridgment of people’s liberty as enacting it.

Michele Bachmann is a solid conservative, but is prone to gaffes and sloppy slips of the tongue such as her mindboggling insinuation that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation.  Herman Cain is a successful former businessman with sensible ideas about the economy but a stunning, blissful ignorance about foreign policy.

Michael Barone correctly notes that just about the only remaining feasible Republican presidential candidates who both are conservative enough and know how to speak without sounding like idiots are Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, and Chris Christie.  Daniels is concerned about his family’s privacy and has decided not to run; Ryan is young, early on in his career, and clearly has no intention of running in 2012.

That leaves Christie, who has certainly denied numerous times that he is running, but whose supporters and staffers seem to be leaking rumors that he may change his mind.  Christie has spent the past few months jetting around the country speaking at high-profile Republican fundraisers, giving speeches at prominent venues such as the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and meeting with potential donors.

Elsewhere I have written at length about why we should encourage Christie in particular to run, including the fact that Republican candidates for governor did well in 2010 in part by emulating his substance and style; that he knows how to take the fight to his opponents; that his popularity among Republican voters is underreported; and that his electability among independents and Democrats is underappreciated.

Christie’s not perfect.  But where is the glaring RomneyCare albatross–whose defense Romney cheekily deleted from the paperback version of his book No Apology—in Christie’s past that will come back to haunt him in the general election, when voters are focused perhaps foremost on repealing ObamaCare?

Christie’s not perfect.  But where are the embarrassing misstatements—like Perry’s lame, botched attack on Romney’s flip-flopping in last week’s debate in Orlando—that lead us to fear Christie will flounder in debates with the supposedly golden-voiced Obama?

Contrast Christie, if you will, with the Republicans’ 2008 nominee, John McCain, who combined the worst aspects of Romney and Perry: liberal policies and inarticulateness.  Republicans should never again have to suffer the ignominy of a nominee who differs only a little bit from the Democratic candidate—or who can’t convincingly explain why he’s to the right of Barack Obama.

The conservative establishment prefers Romney to Perry because they believe him to be more electable.  Some commentators, such as columnist Sandy Rios, believe Republicans will break for Perry over Romney because people “prefer an honest hesitator over a slickster with all the answers.”

But why should Republicans have to choose between a conservative and someone who can talk?

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I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at Congressional Democrats’ withering scorn for House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher system, a plan to which their party has yet to offer an alternative.

This is the party that vituperatively opposed all GOP spending cuts for the past two years, yet unlawfully failed to pass a budget during that period.

The party that insists on calling Republicans the Party of No should be labeled the Party of No Ideas of Their Own.

Charles Blow, for example, filled a recent column with purple prose elucidating why voters find Ryan’s plan repugnant: “[T]he electorate is hurting—a pulsing mass of tender nerves, hypersensitive to things that portend pain, reflexively reacting to the thump of even the softest mallet.”  (And most of them don’t even read the New York Times!)  He continued: “This is not to say that Medicare isn’t in crisis.  It is.  But, we don’t have to gut it to save it.”  He then spent precisely zero space suggesting any alternative solutions.

Blow and other liberals have been crowing about the obscure special election Democrat Kathy Hochul won in NY-26 last week.  They claim that Republican Jane Corwin lost because of Ryan’s recently proposed Medicare plan, since seniors in the district were terrified that electing her would increase the chances of their Medicare payments being cut.

Never mind that Democrats inserted into the race a fake Tea Party candidate who siphoned off up to 9% of the Corwin vote; that the previous officeholder was a Republican embroiled in a sex scandal; or that Corwin was a lousy candidate who failed to utter a word in defense of Ryan’s proposal until days before the election.

(Hey, how is it that thundering losses in the 2010 midterm elections weren’t a referendum on ObamaCare, but loss of one seat in a murky district in upstate New York constitutes a wholehearted rejection of conservatism?)

The irony of Democrats’ MediScare campaign is that Ryan’s relatively mild-mannered proposal is the only plan that would save Medicare.  Continuing to fund Medicare at current levels, the Democrats’ strategy, will bankrupt it.

For those who love Medicare and want to see it continue (which I don’t—but hey, to each his own), the scariest choice is doing nothing to reform it.  In contrast, the most reassuring strategy would be a course of action similar to Ryan’s.

I suspect that if pollsters asking voters whether they want Medicare cut presented the real alternative to that possibility—namely, the fund going bankrupt and an unelected board of bureaucrats rationing care for everyone—the public would be a little more receptive to Ryan’s plan.

Democratic naysayers are rife with general notions of how to deal with entitlement reform, but all of these consist of reflexive opposition to any steps Republicans want to take.

For example, Ryan has quite reasonably proposed reducing Medicare benefits for wealthy retirees—who need them less, if at all—to save money.

But leftists like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders oppose even cutting benefits for the wealthy: “The strength of Social Security and Medicare is that everybody is in.  Once you start breaking that universality and you say that if you’re above a certain income [you’re out], two years later that income goes down and 10 years later it becomes a welfare program.”

Would that Social Security and Medicare were only welfare programs!  They’d sure cost a lot less.  They’d also restore a lot more freedom to the middle class in deciding how to invest their money and plan for retirement.

But for liberals, it’s all about control.  Their message to the wealthy is: We’ll tax the bejesus out of you, but then we’ll deign to give you benefits you don’t need, and then exercise complete control over when and how you receive them.  Aren’t you grateful?

For conservatives, it’s all about liberty.  Their message to the wealthy is: We won’t bother you with government-run insurance you don’t need, and we also won’t harass you with exorbitant taxes for the sin of being productive.  Go do your thing!

Sanders, an avowed socialist whose views are nonetheless inches away from the Democratic mainstream, proves once again that liberals are instinctively upside-down on every public policy issue of importance.  Even when it makes sound fiscal sense to steer benefits toward the poor and take them away from the rich, liberals somehow find a way to oppose that progressive notion.

Democrats claim that 20 years from now, seniors will be getting less from the government to cover their health care costs.  Yes, and if Democrats get their way, not only will seniors will be getting less, the government will be deciding how they spend it, via an unelected Medicare rationing board, rather than letting them shop the market for the care they like best.  Now which party’s plan does the public prefer?

Another political axiom the MediScare campaign proves is that liberals will always take the route that proves most politically feasible, regardless of whether it fails to address the public policy conundrum under consideration, unfairly smears their opponents, or makes no logical sense.

Thus, even the Times’ Gail Collins had to admit, “There is no escaping our fate. We are going to spend the next 17 months hearing about how the Republicans want to kill off Medicare…  By the fall, there will be ads showing the Republicans hacking their way through rows of bedridden seniors with scimitars.”

What’s most frightening: Democrats’ brazenness in hiding behind MediScare so as not to have to address the Medicare crisis, the public’s likelihood of falling for MediScare, or Republicans’ failure to explain MediScare’s utter absurdity?

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Now that Donald Trump and Mike Huckabee have been neutralized as 2012 Republican presidential primary candidates, it’s time to get to work discrediting the thoroughly inadequate and inappropriate front-runner wannabe, Newt Gingrich.

The former Speaker of the House, who initiated the groundbreaking Contract With America in 1994, then pissed away the Republican Congress’s momentum out of timidity after President Bill Clinton was reelected, had his chance to influence the course of national events.  With the notable exception of the successful Welfare Reform Act of 1996, he failed in his mission.

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” candidate Gingrich revealed that he had fallen for the trap of thinking that not raising the federal debt ceiling means that the U.S. will default on its debt, or that default is necessarily a bad thing.  He told host David Gregory that if Obama and the Democratic Senate don’t compromise with House Republicans, he would favor an endless, niggling series of tiny budget cuts and “a debt ceiling [increase] every three weeks” until a long-term solution was reached.

Gingrich thinks the individual mandate component of ObamaCare—the most contentious, despised, and constitutionally dubious element of the bill—is a dandy idea.  He’s quick to clarify that he thinks such an undue violation of our individual freedoms should be carried out on the state level, not the federal level—though that’s not what he said a few years ago.

Gingrich cut a cutesy commercial with Nancy Pelosi in which the odd couple argued for Congress to act more precipitously to adopt anti-global warming legislation, though now he claims to oppose a cap-and-trade system.  He continues to support wasteful ethanol subsidies.

Gingrich famously partnered with race huckster Al Sharpton to promote greater federal involvement in the country’s educational system, based on the fantastic job Washington has done so far.

He opposed the Wall Street bank bailout proposed in the fall of 2008, until moderates in his party pressured him to change his mind, such that by the end of September he suddenly supported it.

Tea Party activists were aghast at Gingrich’s inexplicable endorsement of RINO Dede Scozzafava—who subsequently endorsed the Democrat in the general election after she lost the primary—over true conservative Doug Hoffman in the 2009 special election in NY-23.

On foreign policy, Gingrich opposes waterboarding as an interrogation technique, even though it was demonstrably successful in helping gain intelligence that led to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

But Gingrich’s biggest blunder so far was his mindless, shallow condemnation of House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, which would cut $5 trillion from the budget over the next 10 years and take the painful and necessary step of instituting Medicare entitlement reform.  According to Gingrich on “Meet the Press,” such a plan is “right-wing social engineering.”  Reminder to Newt: Implementing a shortsighted, wealth-redistributing, unsustainable “social insurance” program in 1965 was “left-wing social engineering.”

According to Gingrich, undoing Medicare is too radical, even though instituting Medicare was too radical.  As Orwell might say: Redemption = sin.  Theft = generosity.

At this rate, Gingrich is on track to become the left-wing’s GOP darling, the John McCain of 2012.  He’ll be praised to high heaven by the New York Times editorial board for his forthrightness, bipartisanship, and flexibility—and then he’ll lose in a landslide to Obama, whom The Times and every other liberal media outlet will endorse in the general election before you can say “My friends…”

Proving that his only consistency is inconsistency, Gingrich disavowed his comments on Ryan and the individual mandate the next day.  His opposition to Ryan’s plan lingered in his stated reversal, however: “I think we should be very careful about imposing things on the American people.”  The implication being that privatizing Medicare is just as much an imposition on people as instituting Medicare.  Relief = imposition.  Slavery = freedom.

Gingrich added, “I don’t think you want to come in and to say to every single American, we’re going to come in and change uniformly for all of you in the most fundamental way what happens to you when you are 65.”  Rather than clarifying his position, Gingrich’s comments demonstrated only that he doesn’t understand the first detail of Ryan’s plan, or that he’s shamelessly misrepresenting and oversimplifying it to cover up for his blunder.

Gingrich thinks the will of the people should be respected in implementing major social legislation, but evidently the constitutionality of the legislation is of no great concern, nor does he harbor any presumption that more intrusive legislation should inherently be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than less intrusive legislation.

In a charitable characterization, Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey said, “It’s typical of Newt to be whimsical.  We always say: Newt always has so many great ideas.  Well yeah, but then he shifts between them at such a rate it’s pretty hard to track it let alone keep up with it.”

Gingrich used to be considered a man of principle, but desperation for political relevance has made it clear that he, like McCain—and Huckabee, Trump, and too many other contenders in the GOP field—has no principles.



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On Saturday President Obama magnanimously announced that he was willing to support cutting $33 billion from 2010 federal spending levels for 2011—which, for the mathematically challenged, is about 1% of infinity.

Congressional Democrats screamed that these cuts were way too large.  Republicans countered that the cuts didn’t go far enough and should be extended to $61 billion, which amounts to about 2% of infinity.

With current spending set to run out this week, the federal government faces a shutdown on Friday night unless Congress can agree on which of these piddly sums to cut from the budget.

Tea party supporters have been rightly insulted by these farcical negotiating positions, arguing that hundreds of billions could be saved just by, for example, eliminating redundant programs.

As Rasmussen reports, a majority of Americans haven’t been snookered into thinking these microscopic doses of fiscal austerity will do a thing to address our long-term budget crisis.

Meanwhile, the only Congressman clear-eyed enough to appreciate the extent of the crisis, knowledgeable enough to propose a plan to resolve it, and brave enough to stand up for his proposal in the face of Republican wishy-washiness—namely, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan—and also not crazily isolationist on foreign policy (Ron and Rand Paul) has offered a blueprint called “A Path to Prosperity,” modeled after his 2008 “Roadmap for America’s Future.”

Ryan’s plan proposes phasing out Medicare by replacing it with vouchers and turning it over to the states, making major changes to Medicaid, and taking similar action with Social Security after these two behemoths have been wrestled to the ground.

The central irony of Ryan’s stance is that, as he claims, his is the only proposal that will help “save” these programs, whereas current entitlement obligations will, if continued at their present levels, lead to eventual insolvency.

While Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security are unsustainable, unconstitutional Ponzi schemes, and while our country somehow managed to survive 189 and 159 years respectively without them, I suppose we need to start somewhere.  I guess a Budget Chairman who wants to drastically reform these albatrosses in order to save them is as good a start as we’re going to get nowadays from a political standpoint.

Ryan’s plan proposes cutting $5 trillion from the national debt over the next decade, and eventually eliminating the national debt, all without raising taxes.

On Tuesday, Obama rejected a third stopgap offer from House Majority Leader John Boehner to keep the government open another week while budget negotiations continue.

Obama’s right—we shouldn’t settle for on-the-fly, seat-of-our-pants, week-by-week spending plans.  Republicans should hold their ground and not be afraid to shut the government down on Friday.

Some who claim to favor entitlement reform have counseled House Republicans to compromise with Democrats on this week’s negotiations, so that Democrats will work with them later on more substantial cuts like Ryan’s.  The Chicago Tribune counsels, “Better to declare victory at $33 billion, or whatever more Republicans can wrest from Democrats, and move on to the bigger picture.  Because sanity in federal spending isn’t going to be restored by dealing in billions.  It’s going to be restored by dealing in trillions…  A deal today on discretionary spending could lay the foundation for bipartisan agreement on the far more impactful issue of entitlements.”

So giving in to Democrats will create goodwill and set the stage for larger-scale cuts, whereas shutting down the government will cause Democrats to dig in further and resist compromise later on.

One question: Since when did Democrats respond to Republican compromise with magnanimous, reciprocal behavior?

Sensing that they’re about to win on the shutdown, dyed-in-the-wool leftists like E. J. Dionne are already crying, “The Ryan budget’s central purpose will not be deficit reduction but the gradual dismantling of key parts of government…  Americans are about to learn… how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.”  Ezra Klein whines that Ryan’s plan will mean “leaving the old and the poor without health care.”  These are the people who are going to be placated by giving in on minute cuts now into accepting huge cuts several months from now?

Republicans’ negotiation strategy, from Bush I to Bush II to Boehner, has always been: The other side asks for an inch; Republicans give a mile.  Democrats’ strategy is: The other side asks for an inch; Democrats take a mile.  See how fair and evenhanded things are!

To take just one recent example, Congressional Republicans begged Democrats to consider including medical malpractice tort reform, legalizing health insurance sales across state lines, and offering greater tax deductions for health care costs in their ObamaCare bill.  Democrats responded by ignoring all these ideas and muscling through their bill inappropriately using the budget reconciliation procedure after the enraged residents of Massachusetts denied them their 60th Senate vote.

Battling Democrats legislatively is like fighting terrorists militarily—you don’t show them how weak and spineless you are; you show them how ruthless and merciless you can be.  They don’t respond to anything else.



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5. Ken Cuccinelli – Virginia’s Attorney General took office only in January of this year, after the November 2009 mini-wave election that brought us Republican governor Bob McDonnell. Cuccinelli was first out of the gate nationally to file a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the individual mandate provision of the worst piece of American legislation passed in a generation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (ObamaCare, as it is known, is also the only significant piece of American legislation remaking large swaths of society that did not pass with bipartisan support.) Cuccinelli filed his suit on behalf of Virginia less than 48 hours after passage of the bill, and in August a district court judge ruled that the lawsuit may proceed, which most expect it to do all the way to the Supreme Court.

Cuccinelli earned his stripes for this act alone, but gets bonus points for spearheading an effort–now supported by almost 20 states–to curb the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant. He also scores for investigating former UVA professor Michael Mann’s role in last fall’s ClimateGate.

4. Jim DeMint – Like Sarah Palin, South Carolina Senator DeMint was both prescient and influential in hand-selecting Tea Party candidates to endorse in crucial races across the country for the 2010 midterm primaries. DeMint had a better record of picking true conservatives than Palin, including Chuck DeVore over Carly Fiorina in California and Ovide Lamontagne over Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire.

After a six-year stint as a South Carolina Representative, DeMint was elected to the Senate and made a name for himself as one of the key Senators working to eliminate earmarks in Congress. He was a vocal opponent of the bank bailout President Bush supported and the stimulus bill Obama pushed. DeMint bucked Obama in 2009 and traveled to visit Honduran President-elect Roberto Micheletti in support of the leader’s arrest of leftist former president Manuel Zelaya. DeMint’s one downside is that he received only 33% more of the vote in his 2010 reelection bid than Alvin Greene.

3. Rand Paul – Arguably the most exciting winner in the 2010 midterms, Kentucky Senator-elect Rand Paul is both radically fiscally libertarian and less nutty and isolationist than his eccentric father, Texas Senator Ron Paul, including his opposition to closing Guantanamo Bay and his favoring military tribunals for suspected terrorists. Founder of Kentucky Taxpayers United and a self-described “constitutional conservative,” Paul weathered trivial criticisms over his ophthalmologist board certification, a college prank he played 27 years ago, and his reservations about one of the 10 titles of the Civil Rights Act. He crushed primary opponent Trey Grayson by 23% and general opponent Jack Conway by 12%.

Despite unjustified opposition to the PATRIOT Act, support for tax breaks to companies producing “alternative energy,” and other problems with his platform, Paul is unflinching in his desire to abolish the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax, and the National Department of Education. He also seeks to end federal bailouts and pass a balanced budget amendment, a moratorium on tax increases, and a “Read the Bills” Act.

2. Paul Ryan – In the dark days leading up to the passage of ObamaCare, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan proved himself to be, sadly, one of the few Republicans who could articulate the disastrous projected economic consequences of the legislation and reveal the sleight-of-hand Democratic legislators were using to pass the bill off as deficit-reducing. His efforts were most notable in his starring role in Obama’s embarrassing Blair House Summit in February.

Ryan also introduced the Roadmap for America’s Future, which outlined his plan for managing our country’s gargantuan deficits by addressing entitlement reform for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, including privatizing these programs via vouchers with declining value over time. While most Republicans are still figuring out how to repeal or defund ObamaCare, Ryan is several steps ahead, plotting how to reverse similar debacles passed generations ago and on the verge of bankruptcy.

1. Chris Christie – After winning a surprise victory over incumbent John Corzine last November, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been the conservative politician in recent memory who has most lived up to expectations. Whether fearlessly standing up to teachers’ unions, telling off legislators or reporters who refused to face facts, slashing wasteful government programs with no concern for the self-righteous outcry from beneficiaries of this largesse, or refusing to fund unaffordable new boondoggles like the proposed Manhattan-New Jersey tunnel, Christie put his principles into action and remained surprisingly popular with voters while doing so.

Christie already had a stellar record of accomplishment as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, having won convictions for 130 public officials in corruption cases with a stunning 100% success rate. In an election year full of impressive candidates who ran and won on outstanding platforms of things they promised to do, Christie takes the top spot for actually doing them.

Honorable mentions: Andrew Breitbart, John Cornyn, Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Ron Johnson, John Kyl, Mike Lee, Ted Olson, Tim Scott, Pat Toomey



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Liberals have generously treated us to a motley assortment of apologia for President Obama’s economy-wrecking fiscal policies over the past 19 months:

(1) The economy is doing fine (Ezra Klein)!  We should have expected the recovery to be agonizingly slow, and it is—hence, Obama’s policies worked.

(2) The economy isn’t doing well, but it would have been doing even worse without the stimulus bill (e.g., Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s and bona fide boob).  Without a Keynesian spending orgy—or as Obama puts it, “moving the economy forward”—unemployment wouldn’t have stopped at 10% and might have risen to 12 or 13 or 15%.

(3) The economy is doing poorly, and it’s because the Democrats didn’t do enough (the ever-certifiable Paul Krugman).  The stimulus should have been much bigger, and financial regulations should have been much harsher.  To compensate we need “a second big stimulus, plus much more aggressive Fed policy.”

In contrast, conservatives have suggested the following interpretations of events:

(1) The economy is going to improve soon (Larry Kudlow).  We won’t experience a double-dip recession and growth is resuming, so we should be more optimistic.  Obama’s policies aren’t helping, but American ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit are strong enough that we can recover anyway.

(2) The economy isn’t doing well, and Obama’s policies have made it worse (every other conservative on the planet).  Wasteful spending caused our debt to skyrocket and increased the chances of inflation; government takeover of private industries and burdensome financial regulations created an uncertain climate for investing and hiring that has prolonged the recession.

(3) The economy is doing poorly, and now is the time to discuss not only repealing Obama’s policies and ensuring that the likes of them never pass again, but undoing the policies liberals have inflicted on the nation since FDR under the pretense that once they were in place future generations would be too sheepish to touch them (Paul Ryan).  The impetus from the Tea Party movement should be used to revive talks about privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

So liberals and conservatives are at a bit of a standoff over the fundamental economic principles behind their political strategies.  Who’s right?

Let’s see: economists have demonstrated, time and again, using common-sense reasoning, econometric modeling, and historical data, that increasing government spending yields less economic output than if government had left that money in the private sector to be spent, invested, or saved as those who generated it saw fit.

Economists have shown that increasing marginal tax rates counterintuitively decreases the gross domestic product, especially in the years immediately following tax increases.  Obama’s chief economic advisor, Christina Romer—who just retired over a conflict between her views and the administration’s—documented the effect of this negative tax “multiplier” using empirical data in a recently published economics article.

It doesn’t matter whether we accept Klein’s view that the economy is peachy, Zandi’s view that it’s doing badly but could be worse, or Krugman’s view that it’s doing badly and needs more Obamanomics.  All are based on the false premise that more government spending, taxation, and regulation are better for the economy than less.  (Hey—don’t Keynesians believe that spending lots of money on wars is a good way to revive the economy?  I guess Krugman will be admitting he was wrong about the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts after all!)

People like Klein bemoan the fact that corporate profits are back up to 2006 levels while hiring remains slow.  Liberals present the question of our tepid recovery as an intractable metaphysical mystery incapable of being penetrated by mere humans; as Klein puts it: “That is the catch-22 of the recovery: Businesses will start hiring when the economy recovers. And the economy will start to recover when businesses start hiring.”  Answer: And both will improve when the government gets out of the way!

As for the varying conservative perspectives, which are the only ones remotely connected to reality and thus worth considering, Kudlow is right that the American economy is resilient.  Perhaps he’s slyly making the point that more optimism on the public’s part not only better reflects the state of our economy but may improve it via increased investment and hiring.  Kudlow’s perspective is largely predictive, rather than focusing on how lawmakers should bring about a faster and more permanent recovery (though he often discusses those issues as well).

Every other conservative in the world who believes that we shouldn’t stand for the “new normal” of high unemployment and unexceptional growth is correct that Democrats’ policies are making the recession worse.  Repealing ObamaCare, preventing cap-and-trade legislation, and stopping or reversing the scores of other nasty things Obama and Pelosi have planned for our economy are mandatory undertakings over the next six years.

But Paul Ryan hits the bullseye when he notes that it is desirable, necessary, and possible to go further.  Train wreck legislation like ObamaCare is worth repealing, but if Medicare and Medicaid are quickly running out of money, and Social Security is already in the red, why shouldn’t we go after every entitlement shibboleth?

What principle, applied consistently, would nudge us to nullify ObamaCare but leave Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid shiny and intact?  Did our country survive and prosper before these programs were enacted?  Would we survive and prosper if we phased them out?  Might we prosper even more in their absence?

Ryan’s proposal is far from perfect—his main argument for the Roadmap to recovery is that it will keep our entitlement system solvent, and he doesn’t discuss eradicating entitlements once and for all.  Perhaps Ryan believes that talking about eliminating entitlements is too politically risky now, when even his Roadmap is audacious by today’s standards.  But Ryan deserves credit for having gone further than anyone else in Congress in working out the details of a plan that will help the country avoid a fatal insolvency.



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History in the making, indeed.  The 100,000 constituents who signed the Senate Conservatives Fund’s Repeal ObamaCare Pledge in the first 48 hours since the House passed Obamacare suggest that historic efforts are about to be made to kill this bill before it can inflict its intended and unintended damage.

Here’s a roadmap of priorities for Obamacare opponents in and out of Washington, to get us from this dispiriting week to January 2013:

1. Challenge the constitutionality of H.R. 3962. Work to invalidate its requirement that all individuals purchase a good or service—in this case, health care—as a condition of being alive, something the federal government has never forced its citizens to do.  Contest the federal government’s ability to unload an unfunded mandate onto states, many of which are experiencing budgetary crises and couldn’t afford a new permanent entitlement even if they wanted one.

2. Encourage states to file lawsuits against the bill. Twelve states have already pledged to do so, including Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, Alabama, North Dakota, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Utah, Oklahoma, and Nebraska.  H.R. 3962, unlike many other comprehensive bills previously passed by Congress, fortunately contains no severability clause that leaves the remainder of the bill intact if one part is struck down in court.  Thus, getting a court to nullify just one part of this bill would overturn the entire thing.  Take these court challenges all the way to the Supreme Court.

3. Encourage states to pass laws preventing residents from being required to buy insurance. Thirty-eight states are considering passing such legislation, and 33 have already introduced bills.  These 33 states include Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—all large states that went for Obama in 2008, which disproves liberals’ inevitable charge that rebel states are just rural flyover country filled with racist rednecks.  Virginia (another Obama state) is the first state to have passed such legislation, through an effort led by Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.  Idaho has also passed legislation protecting its residents from the federal mandate.

4. Encourage states to block enforcement of the bill. Refuse to fund it.  How can states that are millions of dollars in the red pay for a massive new program dumped on them by the Fed?

5. Give Congressmen an earful during their spring Congressional recess. Make last summer’s townhalls look like giddy autograph signings.  Jam Congressmen’s schedules with meetings; pressure Senators not to sign the House’s reconciliation measure; pressure House members not to sign any reconciliation measure revised by the Senate.

6. Challenge the reconciliation process. Get the Senate parliamentarian to rule (correctly) that the House’s Social Security-related provision is inappropriate for inclusion in a reconciliation bill, per the Byrd Rule, and must be removed.

7. Change the reconciliation bill. Force the Senate to make changes to the reconciliation bill before voting on it, so that the House has to vote again on the Senate’s version; then force the House to make changes so the Senate has to vote again; and back and forth.  Strip away enough dissatisfied votes from at least one chamber to prevent the reconciliation measure from being passed, thus letting the ugly Senate bill with its backroom deals and tax on costly union health plans stand intact and paving the way for repeal.

8. Hold up the reconciliation process. Encourage GOP Senators to tie up voting on the reconciliation bill in the Senate by proposing an indefinite number of amendments.  Although debate on a reconciliation bill is limited to 20 hours (about one second per 43,000 citizens affected by the legislation), there are no limitations on the number of amendments that may be proposed.

9. Take over the House, Senate, and Presidency. Vote Democrats out of Congress in 2010 and 2012, and Obama out of office in 2012, and elect conservative Republicans who promise to repeal Obamacare.  Support candidates who campaign on the promise to repeal Obamacare as their first act of the 113th Congress in January 2013.  In the same way that Scott Brown annihilated his opponent in Massachusetts by campaigning on one promise—to vote against the Senate health care bill—all Republican Congressional candidates in November 2010 and 2012 should campaign on the sole promise to repeal Obamacare.  Dozens of Representatives and Senators have already pledged to repeal the bill, as have hundreds of 2010 Congressional candidates, including Senate hopefuls Marco Rubio in Florida, Chuck DeVore in California, Michael Williams in Texas, and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania.

10. Repeal H.R. 3962.

11. Amend the Constitution. If necessary, get three-quarters of the states—perhaps the same 38 considering legislation banning the mandate—to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit the federal mandate, thus invalidating the bill.

12. Encourage noncompliance with the bill as a form of civil disobedience. There may be 17,000 new IRS agents under H.R. 3962, but there are 170,000,000 of us who oppose the bill.

As Paul Ryan said in the House Sunday night: “If this passes, the quest to reclaim the American idea is not over.  The fight to reapply our founding principles is not finished; it’s just a steeper climb.  And it is a climb that we will make.”

Let’s give ourselves a boost on the backs of the complacent and wholly unprepared socialized health care supporters who think the fight is over and they have won.



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