It has been very interesting watching the aftermath of the
election play out. There are a slew of
post mortems every day—far too many to read.
Most take as their topic some variation of the question, “What went
wrong for the Republican Party?” Others
look ahead and ask a different question:
“How can the Republican Party expand its support among women, Latinos,
African-Americans, and gays?”
I woke up too early this morning and as I was reading
through some of these pieces I saw the New York Times report on Mitt Romney’sWednesday conference call with fund-raisers and donors. During the call Mr. Romney engaged in his own
bit of analysis of the election results.
His take was a bit surprising to me, but given his earlier unguarded
comments about 47% of Americans being dependent on the government, perhaps it
should not have been.
Mr. Romney did not blame his loss on his own unlikeability,
his Party’s seeming-callousness about women and their reproductive rights, his
calls for self-deportation of people here illegally, his untenable tax cut
plans, his party’s four-year record of obstruction during President Obama’s
first term, or general approval of President Obama and his performance thus
far. No, none of these plausible factors
figured into Mr. Romney’s analysis of why he lost.
Instead, he came up with this: President Obama won because he gave people
gifts. He went on to specify: healthcare coverage, student loan interest
forgiveness, free contraceptives, a path to citizenship for children of illegal
immigrants, and oh-yeah-did-I-mention-healthcare?
At first I read this shallow, self-serving explanation with
incredulity. Mitt Romney is a smart
man. He is known for his keen analytical
mind and ability to dig down deep into a situation and see opportunity where
others see problems. I can understand
how it would be hard to see the deeper truth of the results of this election: that he lost to a man he sees as incompetent. Voters chose President Obama because they saw
him as better able to manage the country through the impending recovery than
Mr. Romney, and that must have stung Mr. Romney.
Had Mr. Romney been elected, he had a bag of gifts of his
own to bestow on the voters. His gifts
were in the form of a 20% tax rate across the board and other goodies, mostly
aimed at the upper income tax brackets.
Rather than seeing Obama policies as the result of decisions about where
and how to direct some of our national resources, Mitt Romney calls them
“gifts” to voting blocks. His own
“gifts” he sees as sound economic policy.
I would like to know the difference.
The global economy has a life of its own. It rises and falls, expands and contracts on
its own schedule. The President of the
United States can affect this rise and fall around the edges, but he or she
does not and cannot control the global business cycle. No matter who won this election, Obama or
Romney, the national economy was going to get better. That is what it does.
In choosing President Obama, Americans decided they like his
vision for who should benefit most from the coming expansion better then Mitt
Romney’s vision of who should benefit most.
THAT is what Presidents do. They
shape national policy in response to economic trends and their policies affect
who suffers most when things fall apart and who benefits most when things
improve. You can choose to look at this
picking of winners and losers as a bestowal of gifts, as Mitt Romney does. But if you do so, you must also admit that no
matter who is in office, gifts are given.
President Obama did not win because he gave voters
gifts. He won because more voters like
his vision of who should benefit most from a rising economic tide than Mitt
Romney’s vision. Mitt Romney’s policies
would continue to concentrate wealth among the already-wealthy. President Obama’s policies will direct some
our growing national resources to people further down the economic ladder. And it turns out that the American voters
were able to compare the policies of the two candidates and choose the one that
would benefit more people.
So in the end, maybe President Obama did win because he gave
people gifts. But the gifts he gave were
different from the ones Mitt Romney listed on his multi-millionaire conference
call. The gifts President Obama gave
were hope and fairness and it turned out that is what the voters wanted.
