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Saturday, September 1, 2007
Romney offers snapshot of success for GOP
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For conservatives the first seven months of Democratic rule in Congress have been traumatic reminders that eight years is not enough. It’s time enough to expand government, but a fraction of the time needed to alter the expansionist course.
Next year’s presidential election, therefore, is crucial. A White House and Congress controlled by a Clinton-Obama, Pelosi-Reid tandem is a conservative’s worst nightmare.
Lock in a U.S. Supreme Court majority at 5-4, given the near certainty that at least one vacancy will occur over the next four years, and any frivolous thoughts about sitting out the election, opting for a third party or choosing a candidate on any basis other than principles and electability should be discarded now. The stakes are too high to be distracted by matters unlikely to affect a president’s policies and decisions — his personal religious beliefs, for example.
While former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was in Atlanta last week, he and I met. I asked about how a conservative president can be effective with a Congress that may very well be controlled by Democrats.
In Massachusetts, Romney confronted precisely the legislative obstacles he’d face with a Pelosi-Reid Congress. And yet, the tax-cutting policy group, Club for Growth in Washington, concludes that his fiscal record there is “more positive than negative, especially when one considers that average spending increased only 2.22 percent over his four years, well below the population plus inflation benchmark of nearly 3 percent.”
One advantage he had that the president does not is line-item veto authority. “To his credit,” Club for Growth observes, “Romney attempted to cut down on government spending by streamlining many duplicative and wasteful elements” of government, though “some of his more ambitious proposals were rejected by his uber-liberal Legislature.”
“In my state” said Romney, “even though I had the line-item veto, in some respects it was a relative weak tool because my Legislature was 85 percent Democrat. And, therefore, anything I vetoed could routinely be over-ridden.
“I recognized very quickly some lessons that I think are very helpful even in a setting where you have the majority in the Legislature. And that is: Number One, you don’t attack your opposition on a personal basis; you maintain personal respect and build relationships of friendship and trust. Number Two, you look for common ground. …
“In our case, we did that in health care where we all agreed it would be a good thing for everybody to have health insurance. I didn’t want government to provide it and they were willing to accept my plan to get people insured with private insurance. And so we found common ground. And they didn’t advance there.
“On something like taxes, the first year I came in we had almost a $3 billion shortfall, and the Democrats thought they had to raise taxes. I said, ‘No, let me take a whack at it, in effect. Let me show you how we can cut $3 billion without having to raise taxes.’ And they ultimately adopted much of what I proposed. We did not raise taxes.
“And, Number Three, where you can’t [find common ground], don’t get angry about it, but try and go to the people.” An example, he says, is a $250 million retroactive tax on capital gains the Legislature approved. “I know I can’t have my veto upheld easily,” he says. Romney directed his Department of Revenue to send tax bills to those affected. The resulting uproar helped Romney persuade the Legislature to reverse course, leading to a rebate in 2002 of retroactive capital gains collected. “There are ways of working in a setting where you are greatly outnumbered.”
The domestic challenge for the next president are to build a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and to protect President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts while checking a possible Democratic majority’s temptation to expand the reach of the federal government. In Massachusetts, Club for Growth continues, Romney “demonstrated a willingness to take on his Legislature and deserves credit for the many pro-growth measures he advocated and the modest reform he was able to achieve.”
After seven months of this Congress, even “modest reform” is appealing.
• Jim Wooten is associate editor of the editorial page. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
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