“If you want to give the policies of the last decade another try", said President Obama today in Ohio, "then you should vote for Mr. Romney.
Mr. Romney, in his own speech minutes before, denounced virtually all forms of regulation, from ones cleaning the air to those preventing banks from engaging in the same destructive behavior that produced the Great Recession on Mr. Bush’s watch. If only the government would get out of the way, he suggested, and stop trying to cover those without health insurance, or keep the groundwater clean, then jobs would magically reappear.
Of course, that didn’t happen when Mr. Bush tried it; painfully slow job growth was followed by a recession that shed nine million jobs. The proposals made by Mr. Obama in Cleveland are more likely to put people back to work: invest more money in education, job training and rebuilding infrastructure. Focus more on developing new energy sources than pulling globe-warming coal from the ground. Lower the deficit through higher taxes on the rich, which could lead to a pact to cut spending responsibly.
The Republican recalcitrance on taxes has led to a Washington stalemate that the president referred to eight times in his speech, saying it can be broken only by the voters. But Mr. Obama’s re-election cannot, by itself, end the impasse. It is once his opponents’ free-market ideas are fully seen to be bankrupt that Congress will either change or begin acting in the country’s interest. Breaking the grip of these ideas truly is, as Mr. Obama said Thursday, “a make-or-break moment for America’s middle class.”
Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites. The stimulus failed. (Three million employed people beg to differ.) The auto bailout was a mistake. (Another million jobs.) Spending is out of control. (Spending growth is actually lower than under all modern Republican presidents.) He says these kinds of things so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.
It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but-overlong speech. The president has less than five months to find a way to make a vital message sink in.
