Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Douthat on Romney   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

I was no great fan of Governor Romney's comments about the Michigan economy, but Ross Douthat is much too hard on the governor. He thinks that conservatives are going too easy on Romney's supposedly left-wing,  "back-to-the-'70s, 'D.C. will save the auto industry' promises" and giving McCain too much grief over his "2000-2001 preference for a more progressive tax code." Many of Romney's policy specifics involved removing Washington-imposed burdens on the industry, such as the prospect of new regulations. You can think he exaggerated their impact—I do—but that's not left-wing. Convening industry reps and government officials to gab about the industry's problems doesn't strike me as all that alarming, either: It's what comes out of the meeting that matters, and Romney didn't commit to anything statist. Romney's plan to quintuple research spending was pretty bad, in my view—but plenty of free-market folks are okay with such subsidies. The reason Romney got a "slap on the wrist" is that it's all he deserved.

When I was on McCain's bus a few weeks ago, I asked the senator about his argument that the Bush tax cuts were too tilted to the wealthy. I think it's a fair question, because as it stands it is very difficult to figure out what McCain thinks about the issue. He has staked a large part of his campaign on being a "straight talker," and on this issue he is anything but. (Douthat also cuts McCain too much slack on the timeline. He was standing by his criticism of the Bush tax cuts' regressivity in 2005. When I asked him about it, he said it was ancient history not worth going into.)

01/16 11:35 AMShare