Ezra Klein: Moderate Mitt Isn't So Moderate

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Last edited Mon Oct 8, 2012, 10:41 PM - Edit history (1)

Moderate Mitt isn’t so moderate
Posted by Ezra Klein
October 8, 2012

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush raised the top marginal income tax rate from 28 percent to 31 percent to help cut the deficit. In 2003, Sen. John McCain introduced the Senate’s first cap-and-trade plan to cut carbon emissions. In 2006, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney used federal dollars, state taxes and an individual mandate as the foundation for the first successful state-run universal health-care law. In 2008, President George W. Bush pushed and signed a deficit-financed tax cut called “The Economic Stimulus Act of 2008” to help ease the pain of the recession.

Keep these policies in mind as you consider the agenda that brought us “Moderate Mitt” in last Wednesday’s debate. Romney promised he wouldn’t raise a cent in taxes to retire a debt far larger than the one George H. W. Bush faced. He had nothing at all to say about climate change. He said health-care reform should proceed state-by-state, but he proposed Medicaid cuts that would make it impossible for any other states to do what Massachusetts did in 2006. He offered no short-term help to the unemployed, proposing instead to concentrate on long-term initiatives like energy independence. He again proclaimed allegiance to his budget promises, which would mean a 40 percent cut in everything but Medicare, Social Security and defense spending by 2016, though the only specific cut he mentioned was to PBS.

The list of Mitt’s moderate moments, meanwhile, goes something like this. “Regulation is essential,” he said. “You can’t have a free market work if you don’t have regulation.” He also swore fealty to Medicare — though he wants to move it into a premium support system in which seniors use a capped voucher to choose between Medicare and private insurers. He forswore any intention to give tax cuts to the rich, or really to anybody, though he didn’t explain how that would work given his promise to cut tax rates by 20 percent across-the-board.

We’ve seen what Romney does when he fears the right: He folds. That’s how his tax cut, which was initially modest, grew so large. That’s how he yoked himself to the insanely large cuts required by the Cut, Cap and Balance pledge. That’s how he signed Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge after opposing it in Massachusetts. That’s how he came to call the individual mandate, a policy he’d passed in his state and publicly championed for the nation, unconstitutional.

Romney isn’t an ideological moderate. He’s a pragmatic executive. When he needs to govern from the center, he does. When he needs to lurch to the right, off he goes. So if you want to know how he’ll govern, don’t listen to what he says. Look at who he has reason to fear.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/08/moderate-mitt-isnt-so-moderate/