Newt Gingrich at least is the kind of conservative that conservatives can rely upon to settle their scores for them, especially when that means getting off a bon mot at the expense of the media. Rick Santorum is at least an anti-Mitt who is also an anti-Newt—walking the talk when it comes to family.
Yet what conservatives like least about Mitt Romney—aka Mr. Calculation—is exactly the quality paid off in his swift and effective response to the rise of Newt Gingrich in Florida. It's not just that Mitt stuck the knife in; he did it when necessary, coolly, and without malice. Yes, Mr. Romney still needs a big idea or two, but he'll always be the get-it-done candidate.
But get what done? Off to the side persists the debate about his business career and his taxes, and meanwhile President Obama just put taxes at the center of the 2012 election with his new campaign document, er, budget that fleshes out his premise that making the rich "pay their fair share" is the solution to all America's problems.
Why not pick up this gauntlet? Mr. Romney might give his candidacy some life with a straightforward promise: Tax reform will deliver prosperity, and I will deliver tax reform. His campaign would finally have a theme for its pudding. It would also have the inestimable additional benefit of challenging the central myth of Mr. Obama's political persona.
Let us quickly acknowledge that the phrase "dishonest political rhetoric" is often a case of using three words where two will do. Mr. Obama blazes no trails in this regard. You might even say he and Mr. Romney deserve each other in the fall, since both are—and we mean this in the most respectful way—utter political fakers. But nonetheless it's past time that somebody challenged Mr. Obama on the claim, so central to his presidential appeal four years ago, that he is a pure soul who transcends partisanship.
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Rick Santorum (left), MItt Romney and Newt Gingrich at a Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Fla., Jan. 23
.Bipartisan is when the parties act on matters on which there is agreement. Bipartisan leadership is when a president challenges his opposition to vote for things it claims to support. There is no clearer case than tax reform, which was endorsed by Mr. Obama's fiscal commission, by Rep. Paul Ryan, by countless other Republicans in the Reagan mold, by economists of every complexion.
Mr. Obama himself, when exhibiting his post-partisan reasonableness for the press, pays lip service to a flatter, less-distorting tax code. He did so again this week, even as he proposed to festoon the tax code with more distortions.
A pro-growth tax reform enacted a year or two ago, we're convinced, would have given employers and investors a badly needed jolt of confidence and voters the pleasure of seeing that their country can govern itself successfully. It would have helped repair the nation's strained finances. It would have coaxed Americans to begin the necessary job of saving and budgeting for their own retirement and health care. It would have done nothing to prejudice Mr. Obama's expansionist social welfare agenda—unless, that is, Mr. Obama believes recovery itself would have been prejudicial to his agenda (perhaps a subject for Tim Geithner's memoirs).
Mr. Obama's insincerity on tax reform has been a giant missed opportunity. Mr. Romney is the get-it-done candidate. He could not only point to Mr. Obama's failure to act, but explain why—because it would conflict with the campaign of class resentment that he and his surrogates are so busy denying they intend to run on in the fall.
Mr. Romney needs to do something. Mr. Santorum's rise is a telling rebuke—a "conservative" who hails from a blue state and yet who succeeded because he found a natural way to bridge the gap, thanks to his affiliation with unions and hard-hat workers. Yes, his resulting tax and subsidy prescriptions may be unwise, but at least he's made his way without repeatedly flipping positions on fundamental issues.
Mr. Romney has been as mealy-mouthed, in his own way, as Mr. Obama on taxes, favoring a pro-growth tax code for everybody but "the rich." Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney could both do themselves a favor, talking honestly for a change about what they believe, if they turned the campaign into a debate about whether we want a tax code geared toward redistribution or toward growth.
For that matter, all Republicans in the race, including Mr. Santorum, could learn from Ronald Reagan, whose name they constantly invoke. In a parting address to his White House staff on Dec. 13, 1988, Reagan touched all the conservative hot buttons but placed instructively narrow brackets on his own administration's contributions, saying: "As a first step, we said that the way to restore vitality to the economy was to cut marginal tax rates and cut needless regulations."
This is wisdom. Americans know the right way to live and don't need either party's social engineering (to borrow a phrase from Newt Gingrich). What they need is more prosperity, to enable them to live the lives they aspire to.
