ConservativeHome's The Republican

Rick Perry, languishing in the single digits, still gets frontrunner treatment because of money and his non-Romney persona

Ryan Streeter
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For someone languishing in single digits in the polls, Rick Perry still seems like a frontrunner. Unlike those (Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul) polling at the same levels, you’d think from the media’s coverage of Perry’s every speech and every move that he, Romney and Cain are neck-in-neck.

In the latest Des Moines register poll Perry’s support stood at 7%, tied with Newt Gingrich and well behind Cain’s 23% and Romney’s 22%. And in last week’s YouGov/Economist poll Perry tied Ron Paul at 9%, with Cain out front at 28% and Romney at 24%.

Yet Perry remains a presence in the media. For instance, he factors prominently in this WSJ article on presidential candidates’ economic plans, while Jon Huntsman – who rolled out a plan early on that won a lot of praise (including from WSJ’s editorial board) – isn’t even mentioned. Over the weekend, Perry’s Fox appearance got a disproportionate amount of coverage given his low poll numbers, and today he appears prominently atop the New York times politics page. While Herman Cain has been a dominant presence given his frontrunner status and will only stay in the news more because of the sexual harassment allegations that Politico wrote about last night, Perry remains nearly an equal force.

An obvious explanation for this is money. He outraised Romney in the previous quarter, and his ad buys are garnering attention (he has a new ad out in Iowa today).

But I suspect another reason is that to most observers, he still remains the most likely non-Romney candidate to win the nomination. Why?

To the point above, it’s going to take money and organization to be an effective non-Romney. Perry has that. Herman Cain is trying to grow that, but he’s still far behind.

Perhaps more importantly, Perry’s “non-Romneyism” is clear and unequivocal. Cain’s is not. While Perry has stumbled to make himself clear in public forums and debates, his clarity on the issues is pretty straightforward. He has been unapologetic about his stance on educating the children of illegals (even if he apologized for his choice of words), bold about his flat tax even as conservatives have criticized it, unrepentant about calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and so on. Cain, on the other hand, is articulate but has been conceptually unclear on a number of things except his 9-9-9 plan – which in itself is a muddled policy because it’s only a transition to a goal of a national sales tax. On the border, abortion, and foreign policy, for instance, Cain has said things he later has had to try to clarify – often in ways that don’t make the matter much clearer at all.

Trademark Romneyism is a lack of clarity on the issues. Erick Erickson captures the sentiment many conservatives feel when he describes Romney as the “magically malleable man of mystery.” To be non-Romney is to be clear on the issues, especially in ways that set you apart from Romney's latest iteration of beliefs and policies. Perry, for all of his verbal clumsiness, has managed to carve out distinctions between himself and Romney in ways that Cain hasn’t. This benefits Perry in terms of coverage. The question, of course, is how much it will benefit him in the polls. Cain, after all, has spent virtually no time in Iowa and yet has managed to capture voters’ imagination. Can he keep this up (the new harassment allegations notwithstanding) while trailing Perry’s fundraising and amidst his consistent policy foibles? I think not, but so far, the 2012 race has been full of surprises.

On issue after issue, Obama is as vulnerable as he has been - but will the GOP be able to capitalize?

Ryan Streeter
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The Daily Beast reports that Mitt Romney is out-fundraising Barack Obama in important battleground states. The situation for Obama is even bleaker than the report suggests when you consider how much money is flowing to GOP candidates other than Romney and thus will at some point start re-directing to the clear frontrunner and eventual nominee (Karl at the Green Room summarized the GOP field’s fundraising against Obama’s a few weeks ago here).

So, even though we’ve been hearing a lot about how successful Obama’s fundraising is going to be, it’s not clear that he’s going to dominate the ad buys and the get-out-the-vote efforts any more than his rival.

And it gets worse for the President.

When you look into the latest YouGov/Economist poll (pdf), you see a President who has weakened exactly where he has hoped all along to be strong. For the following three items, the figure on the left is the percentage of Americans who “strongly disapprove” of Obama’s handling of the issue, and the figure on the right is the percentage of people who said the issue is “very important” to them.

• The economy  45% / 80%
• The budget deficit  44% / 58%
• Health care  43% / 70%

Everyone knows the economy will dominate this campaign and that Obama will do all he can to blame the condition of the economy on Republicans, since he can’t point to much that shows his policies are helping it. If you add those who “somewhat disapprove” of Obama’s job on the economy to the 45% above, then 61% of the American public disapproves of his economic performance.

The same with health care. This was supposed to be Obama’s major achievement. The law is losing support among Democrats, and the more the Obama Democrats in Congress such as Nancy Pelosi try to defend the ridiculous number of waivers granted under the law, the more ridiculous the law looks itself.

The budget deficit is not an Obama creation, but it’s historically rapid growth is. And Americans know it. Obama has tried every gimmick in the book to make it look like he knows how to manage the deficit (e.g., the now-defunct CLASS act was supposed to pay for part of ObamaCare, the Bush economy he inherited gave him no choice but to spend historically high amounts, his call to reform Medicare without offering a plan and hoping no one noticed, etc.).

The poll looks worse for Obama when you compare the public’s approval/disapproval percentages issue-by-issue. On issues that Americans care about, far more disapprove of Obama than approve.

Of course, all of this will matter much less than it should if a Republican candidate doesn’t emerge who gains the public’s confidence on these issues. Romney polls the best head-to-head with Obama, but it remains to be seen whether the public would expect him to do better on the issues in which they have so little confidence in Obama.

The mathematician vs. the rhetorician: Why Paul Ryan has become Barack Obama’s biggest headache

Ryan Streeter
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He may not be running for President (despite our best efforts to draft him and continued pleas from the American public), but Paul Ryan is the biggest, thorniest bur in Barack Obama’s saddle. His speech at the Heritage Foundation yesterday was another example of why.

He took Obama to task by undermining both the philosophical and mathematical justifications of the President’s desperate campaign to use class to divide America. Among Republicans, Ryan has proved himself the most-skilled at going head-to-head with Obama in the public square.

The present field of GOP candidates has done little to date to put Obama on the defensive or knock him back onto his heels. If anything, Obama has done himself the most harm by appearing clueless about the economy and vindictive toward those offering real reform ideas. But if anyone has done more to back Obama into a corner, it is Paul Ryan.

When Obama’s budget and State of the Union address were devoid of any serious deficit reduction and completely ignored his own deficit commission’s recommendations, Ryan’s budget, which became the House Republicans’ budget, countered with far-reaching proposals to reform the tax code and fundamentally re-do Medicare. Ryan pushed the public debate on the issues so far that Obama was forced to respond with his own deficit reduction...speech. But it was a start for the President. Unfortunately, he chose to do things like invite Ryan to the White House only to lecture him publicly on budgetary matters. That never worked for Obama. He eventually had to do more. He created yet another deficit reduction group and fumbled his way through the summer on the issue before calling Congress together to give a jobs speech that was, in reality, a call for more stimulus spending. He followed that speech with another on the deficit, which avoided taking on the big issues. Americans were onto his game by that point and have consistently paid him back with low approval ratings.

Meanwhile, as GOP presidential hopefuls were debating what to do about the economy, it was hard not to notice how much tax reform, if not entitlement reform, were the defining terms of the debate – and they still are. This is all because Paul Ryan defined the boundareis for 2012 early on.

Time and again, Obama has looked the weakest while trying to respond to a public debate he lost control of – to Paul Ryan.

In yesterday’s speech Ryan showed why he’s Obama’s biggest headache.

The House budget committee chairman sawed away at the flimsy philosophical foundation of Obama’s favorite meme: class warfare. And he used one of his favorite tools – math – to do so. He said:

Telling Americans they are stuck in their current station in life, that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control, and that government’s role is to help them cope with it – well, that’s not who we are. That’s not what we do.

Our Founding Fathers rejected this mentality. In societies marked by class structure, an elite class made up of rich and powerful patrons supplies the needs of a large client underclass that toils, but cannot own. The unfairness of closed societies is the kindling for class warfare, where the interests of “capital” and “labor” are perpetually in conflict. What one class wins, the other loses.

The legacy of this tradition can still be seen in Europe today…The United States was destined to break out of this bleak history. Our future would not be staked on traditional class structures, but on civic solidarity. Gone would be the struggle of class against class.

Ryan pulled out the various data points to justify his claims that mobility is still alive and well in America:

• The Treasury Department’s latest study on income mobility in America found that during the ten-year period starting in 1996, roughly half of the taxpayers who started in the bottom 20 percent had moved up to a higher income group by 2005.

• Meanwhile, half of all taxpayers ended up in a different income group at the end of ten years. Many moved up, and some moved down, but economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most people over this period.

All of this undermines the case for Obama’s redistributive (retributional?) justice aimed at taxing the rich to lift up everyone else. But to make matters worse for Obama, Ryan also points out that Obama’s plans won’t even do what he says they’ll do:

• Let’s say we took all the income from those the President calls “rich” – those making $250,000 or more. A 100 percent tax rate on their total annual income would only fund the government for six months.

• Under the President’s policies, deficits are set to rise by a whopping $9.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

• Letting the top two tax rates expire would equal roughly 8 percent of that planned deficit increase.

• Eliminating tax subsidies for oil and gas companies would only equal 0.5 percent of the President’s planned deficits.

• And what about corporate jet owners? That provision would reduce those deficits by just 0.03 percent.

Ryan's speech was aimed at reminding Americans who they are, and demonstrating how just about everything Obama is talking about will do very little to fix the problems the President blames the rich for.

Pete Wehner writes that Ryan’s speech is evidence that he is the “foremost intellectual defender of American conservatism” around today. He’s right. No one else on the national stage is doing more to redefine conservatism for the 21^st century by showing its sharp distinctions from a left that is proving ineffective under its current anointed leader, the President.

Ryan’s speech drew an immediate response from the President’s press secretary yesterday with a predictable line about how Obama has tried to work in a bipartisan way with Republicans. But so long as Obama can’t mount a defense of his vision for America to match Ryan’s, he will be swinging from the ropes, back on his heels.

Paul Ryan may not be running for President in 2012, but he may do more than any of the GOP candidates to weaken Obama over the next year.

The more radical the better: A positive take on Cain's and Perry's tax proposals

Ryan Streeter
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The coverage of Rick Perry’s flat tax announcement today will proceed along two lines: first, people will analyze it politcally and whether it takes gold dust away from Herman Cain; and second, others will critique it on its merits as a tax plan, and most will critique it negatively with a few Steve Forbes-like supporters praising it.

It would help to have a third line. Something from the “save America” lobby – that is, those people who realize that without radical tax reform and substantial debt reduction activity, we might just be sunk. Herman Cain’s plan may not be the right one, and Perry’s may end up falling short, too. But we should applaud the desire each has not to tinker around the edges but to infuse radical change into a tax code that has been growing like a Kudzu vine around the throat of our economy for several decades now. And we should think about how the proposals together with complementary deficit-reduction measures would work.

There are two reasons why greater radicalism is necessary:

1. We need greater economic growth than we realize to sustain our population growth.
2. If we don’t get such growth, it’s hard to discover a scenario that helps us deal with our debt problems before they get the best of us.

On the first point Joel Kotkin distills the point better than anyone. He writes that America’s “growing workforce means the country needs to create 250,000 new jobs a month—twice what we produce in a ‘good’ month today—just to stay even.”

Without this kind of growth, we cannot produce the type of revenue we need to pay down our debt, which is part of a growing global crisis, which brings us to the second point.

According to David Smick in the current Weekly Standard, global private and public debt stands at 300 percent of GDP. This has led some analysts to say the global economy is already beyond the point of no return, and given the fact that global indebtedness has increased 17 percent since the global downturn, you can sort of sympathize with the analysts.

Smick writes that the tax reforms on the table probably won’t see the light of day until we face a severe crisis, and then he says:

Yet these reforms may not be enough. Policymakers also need to reform today’s slow-to-lend, too-big-to-fail banks. Here’s an important question: Should governments and central banks continue to try to prop up the value of the assets on bank balance sheets even though those values are unsustainable? This losing battle has already contributed to global public debt-to-GDP ratios that boggle the mind. We may be saving our banks, but we’re losing our economy.

He continues by saying that lawmakers have begun feeling helpless exactly at the moment they need to feel audacious.

Everyone running for President (which includes Obama) should thus be doing the following:

• Propose tax reform that is radical enough to jump-start real growth. We can’t cut marginal rates as deeply as Reagan did, so the stimulus to growth will have to come from somewhere else. Cain and Perry should at least be applauded for trying on this front.

• Explain what kind of entitlement reform they support that both protects current retirees and bring down the deficit faster than the Ryan plan. That would truly be radical.

• Explain in clear terms how to reform Dodd Frank. It’s pretty clear that the fog of that law is freezing capital in ways that are bad for the economy. We need more start-ups, more new high-growth enterprises. We need to hear how we get there by changing, or ditching, the rules.

There’s more we could demand of the candidates, but let’s start there.

It's time for Republican candidates to creatively tap into the sentiments underlying OWS

Ryan Streeter
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Given the crazies that came out to launch the Occupy Wall Street movement, it was easy early on to dismiss the protests. We’ve seen protestors like this at WTO and other events disperse at the first sign of rain or cold weather, and besides, the protestors haven’t been able to say what they’re all about.

It’s also been pointed out that most Americans are paying attention to other things besides the protests. It has seemed only like a matter of time before they fizzle.

But new polling is showing that the more people pay attention to the OWS story, the more they sympathize with the protestors. This should give conservative critics of the movement some pause.

While only 22% of Americans say they are paying attention to OWS, according to Pew, that is up 5 percentage points from the previous week. When it comes to the news that Americans are following most closely, it’s the economy, but OWS follows close behind. The two stories are inter-related, obviously, and instead of turning Americans off, OWS seems rather to be attracting some sympathy.

Now, conservatives may complain that a sympathetic mainstream media is giving disproportionately favorable coverage to the movement, and that’s surely true. But it’s also irrelevant. The main thing to note is that Wall Street has been the perfect target, more than “the rich” in the abstract.

Americans are fairly divided on how they think about Wall Street. Pew’s political typology, constructed before the protests, shows that Americans think Wall Street hurts more than it helps the economy by a margin of 47-38.

 

A plurality of what Pew calls “Main Street Republicans” track with the national trend, 45-36. While conservatives generally think Wall Street helps the economy, the margins are not necessarily overwhelming. And if Pew were to do this survey again now, we would likely see even more antipathy toward the financial sector because of the coverage of the protests.

We would also see antipathy because of how things are going right now. Consider just two examples:

A new Gallup poll shows that Americans plan to spend on Christmas the same amount they spent last year. That may seem trite, but anticipated spending at Christmas is a fairly good indicator of how consumers feel about the economy and their place in it. No renewed confidence this year.

Second, as Alan Blinder writes in the Wall Street Journal today, foreclosures are keeping our economy in a slump, and yet there seems to be very little activity aimed at addressing the problem. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not to mention big banks, seem to be back to the business of watching over shareholders while ordinary Americans sit amidst financial turmoil rooted in their slumping home values. Too many American voters are quietly suffering through this slump in ways that only fan the flames of resentment and anger toward Wall Street.

In terms of political leadership the only thing conservatives have going for them on this front is that Obama’s approval remains very low. He hasn’t gotten a boost from OWS. Americans have soured on his ability to lead us out of this economic mess.

So now is the time for conservatives to more vocally defend the sentiments underlying the protests and make clear connections between their tax and entitlement reform proposals and growth. They need to get ahead of public sympathy before they find themselves in a position of playing catch-up - which always makes you look desperate and insincere. Now is the time to be pointing out that the best way to handle the wealthy is to write them out of entitlements and get rid of their advantages in the tax code. And now is the time to talk about what to replace Dodd-Frank with – no one can say what the candidates think about that.

Whoever does this creatively will likely see a bigger boost in the polls than one might expect.

Rick Perry should overcome his "faith problem" by giving a big speech on religion and the public square

Ryan Streeter
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Let’s be clear about one thing in the whole Pastor Jeffress controversy that swirled around Rick Perry this past week: calls for him to condemn Jeffress’s comments seemed to come with greater intensity from mainstream outlets that were a bit quieter back in Barack Obama’s Jeremiah Wright days.

That said, Rick Perry has a bit of a problem in the affair that he should just end by giving a speech on faith in the public square, his understanding of it, and why Jeffress is perversely off base.

By not speaking out clearly and forcefully on the whole matter, Perry has let the Jeffress issue linger. And now that’s created a bigger problem: via Kathryn Jean Lopez, we learn that Catholic League president Bill Donahue has pointed out that Jeffress also has said that:

The Roman Catholic Church was the outgrowth of a “corruption” called the “Babylonian mystery.” He continued, “Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word. It comes from that cult-like pagan religion. Isn’t that the genius of Satan?

Jeffress hasn’t just created a Mormon problem for Perry, he’s created a Catholic problem, which is a much bigger deal.

And as if this hasn’t made faith an issue that’s complicated enough for Perry, his wife Anita spoke emotionally today when she said that he had:

been brutalized and beaten up and chewed up in the press to where I need this today. We are being brutalized by our opponents, and our own party. So much of that is, I think, they look at him because of his faith. He is the only true conservative - well, there are some true conservatives. And they're there for good reasons. And they may feel like God called them too. But I truly feel like we are here for that purpose.

It’s hard not to feel deep sympathy with what Anita Perry is saying. These have to be trying times for her and her husband. Rick Perry has been brutalized – in the polls and public opinion. But most of this has come on account of his poor debate performances than because of his faith. Perry has been incredibly open about his faith, and his prayer rally before he launched his campaign – though sneered at by elites – did him no harm whatsoever. He polled well with independents shortly thereafter and launched a much-anticipated campaign that saw him skyrocket in the polls.

Faith didn’t become a problematic issue until the whole Jeffress mess.

Given what Jeffress has said about the Catholic Church, and given how the Perrys apparently feel about the role that faith is playing in the public treatment of Rick Perry, it would be good if the Texas Governor would give a speech about religion in the public square. He could, like George W. Bush, talk personally about how his faith has changed him and guided him. It would also give him an opportunity to speak out against those who use religion as a weapon of division and hate. And he could talk about how religion keeps families together, inspires people to live well and be productive, and is a force for good in America.

It could also serve the purpose of bringing energy back into his campaign.

Conservatives are quickly finding consensus on why they don't like Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan

Ryan Streeter
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The number “9” was mentioned 85 times during Tuesday’s debate. That’s because Herman Cain and the other candidates kept bringing up his 9-9-9 plan.

The debate wasn’t even finished before people began speculating that we’d see a whole new level of analysis of the plan this week.

And we have.

In a few short days, the critics seem to outnumber the supporters and have come rather quickly to consensus on why the plan won’t fly.

• Ed Morrissey gives one of the best treatments of the pro’s and con’s of Cain’s plan today. He points out that as much as Cain tries to avoid it, the 9-9-9 plan is almost inescapably regressive. Every analysis seems to hit lower-income households harder (of course, given that nearly half of the country pays no income tax, just about any plan to “broaden the base,” as we Republicans like to say, will hike some taxes on people who don’t pay any now). Morrissey is right about this. Cain will have a hard time staying in front of this issue the way he wants. Morrissey ultimately ends up in the camp that I predict will soon become conservatives’ consensus on Cain’s plan: we should try to jump over the 9-9-9 plan, which Cain says is an intermediate step, to a constitutionally-limited Fair Tax or other flatter plan. Conservatives simply don’t want to be a position of having both an income tax and a sales tax for the simple and probable reality that politicians will never take the next step and remove the income tax.

• At Coffee and Markets, Dan Mitchell makes this point in a podcast today: the underlying economics of the plan are very good: lower marginal rates on productive behavior, eliminating double taxation, and removing loopholes. But from a political economy perspective, 9-9-9 as an intermediate period of time with a sales tax and an income tax creates a toxic environment full of political temptation. Also, the business 9% tax looks like the VATs we see in other countries that tax wages and benefits and therefore effectively tax income twice (Josh Barro highlighted this point, from Bruce Bartlett, a couple days ago). The biggest problem, though, is that 9-9-9 could become 29-29-29. This is also the point Morrissey and others are making. Using the plan as an intermediate step to a Fair Tax seems ultimately like a bad idea. It would be better to do Cain’s step one – cut taxes – and then jump to step three – the Fair Tax – and skip 9-9-9.

• Matt Lewis has said that 9-9-9 is dumb-dumb-dumb because, similar to Mitchell’s point, members of Congress will soon raise it to “11-11-11 — or 14-14-14 — or…”

• Dean Clancy at FreedomWorks lays out the good, bad, and the ugly in the plan. The “ugly” is, once again, when you put the components together, Cain’s plan sets a VAT structure in place.

In the end what seems to be the biggest flaw in Cain’s proposal is simply that he’s touting an intermediate step to a more perfect policy as his main campaign idea. That’s very strange, and seems to be without much historical precedent. Usually, you go after the ideal knowing you’ll have to compromise downward. In this case, he goes with a flawed middle ground in hopes of getting people to agree on the ideal.

This is especially bad for Cain because it makes him look politically naïve. As critics have already pointed out, who really believes that lawmakers would adopt a 9-9-9 plan with the intention of someday adopting a full Fair Tax? Congress cannot even enact spending cuts it passes into law, let alone actually remove the income tax altogether.

Since it is imperfect, as Cain has admitted it is, and given that more and more people will be raising this point about political infeasibility (and perhaps naïveté), it raises the question “why pursue it at all?” If Cain replies, “because it’s the best we can do,” that will begin to disappoint people, and if he says “well, let’s not pursue it after all,” he then flops.

It seems his strategy of pursuing a step rather than a final policy can’t do anything but backfire.

A deeper look into the NBC/WSJ poll numbers offers some lessons for Republicans

Ryan Streeter
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The major headline from today’s NBC/WSJ poll has been that Herman Cain tops Mitt Romney as the Republican frontrunner.

Digging deeper, the poll contains a number of other interesting findings.

The most illuminating is the degree to which Republican primary voters care about the deficit and debt compared to the population as a whole. While 70% of the public and 60% of GOP primary voters list the economy as a first or second top priority for the federal government, 52% of GOP primary voters name the debt and deficit as a top priority compared to 35% of all voters. This suggests that GOP presidential candidates should speak more directly about how to reduce the deficit. Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan may not survive increased scrutiny, but his focus upon it has helped him. The candidate who does the same thing on deficit reduction may find him or herself rewarded.

Don't confuse Cain's high marks with electability. Obama out-polls Romney as voters' first choice 46-44 - inside the margin of error and virtually unchanged from the NBC/WSJ August poll. By comparison, Obama leads Cain 49-38.

The poll’s wrong-track numbers are nearing their October 2008 levels, when the nation was in a dark spiral in the wake of the markets’ collapsing. Back then, 78% of voters said the nation was on the wrong track. Today, the number is 74%, up from 56% at the beginning of the year. As bad as this is for the country, it holds some obvious advantages for the GOP frontrunners.

Barack Obama’s 51% disapproval number matches last month, which is as high as it has been. Only 23% of voters say they have a “very positive” impression of him, his lowest point since becoming President (this figure was 47% right after his inauguration). His pivot to class-warfare-tactician-in-chief has not helped him over the past month. Every time the President goes after the rich, sympathize with the sentiment and then remind voters of how the economy is doing and how Obama's plans will change virtually nothing.

However, it’s worth noting that Obama’s total positive numbers stand at 46%, while Herman Cain is at 24% and Mitt Romney at 27%. Those positive numbers won’t translate into votes for Obama, as his head-to-head match-up numbers make him much more fragile. But these numbers should be instructive to GOP candidates. Be wise in how you attack Obama.

Finally, Republican voters may have finally grown weary of hoping for a better candidate. In June, when asked how satisfied they were with the GOP field, 45% said they were satisfied and 45% said they were dissatisfied. Today, 63% say they are satisfied, compared to just 31% who are dissatisfied.

What do Republican GOP candidates think about America's frightfully large health care sector? Not enough that's good. Here's a guide to what they think

Ryan Streeter
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In last night’s GOP presidential debate Mitt Romney said it wasn’t enough to repeal ObamaCare; we need to replace it.

Hear, hear.

But, unfortunately, there was no real debate about that issue or any questioning of him about what he would do to replace the terrible health care law.

When it comes to health care, which is consuming scarily larger portions of the U.S. economy each year, no one really knows what the candidates would do. Given health care’s growing role in the U.S. economy, and given how much government interference and policy fuels that growth, we should have a debate devoted entirely to health care. But we won’t see that anytime soon.

So how to tell what the candidates think?

Kaiser Health News has compiled a helpful chart laying out the views of the 2012 GOP candidates on several health care issues.

What surprises me the most is that when it comes to reforming the health care marketplace, the candidates as a whole seem to lack unity on perhaps the most important reform idea of the past decade: getting rid of the preference for employer-provided care in the tax code, and replacing it with a universal credit for purchasing insurance. This was central to George W. Bush’s health care reform ideas, which never gained enough support to pass Congress, and became a theme of McCain’s in 2008.

But, strangely, none of the candidates take it up despite all the evidence that it’s the most effective tool for infusing market-based cost controls on the rapidly rising prices in health care.

Romney says he supports a deduction for people who buy insurance on their own. That gets us part of the way there, but it’s just not good enough.

What’s doubly weird about this is that there is no new thinking needed. Most of the thought has been done. We just need to promote the idea, which will do more bring much-needed competition into this incredibly uncompetitive sector. We can make the idea more politically feasible by ensuring that people who have employer-based plans that they like continue to receive that benefit, and Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru have proposed.

Given the size of the health care sector, its dysfunction, and Obama’s role in making it worse, it’s pretty shocking that no GOP candidate has chosen to lead the way in explaining the way out of this mess to the American public.

Mitt Romney wins the New Hampshire debate without a plan, Cain keeps himself in a close second with a plan – and everyone else slides farther behind

Ryan Streeter
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Mitt Romney and Herman Cain maintained their top tier status in last night’s debate, but for different reasons.

Romney maintained his frontrunner status by dominating the debate with a clear-headed presence. He managed to say a lot about a lot, with a lot of words, without ever really articulating a plan for anything. Cain, on the other hand, didn’t veer into too many topics but managed over and over to bring the attention back to his main plan: 9-9-9. Cain's biggest victory was that despite problems inherent in his 9-9-9 plan, the other candidates didn't really hone in on them.

Romney convinced viewers that he’s a solid leader capable of taking on anything – even if he doesn’t have a plan for anything that people can articulate (i.e., he has a 59 point plan on the economy, but who can explain it?). Cain convinced viewers that his 9-9-9 plan should be taken seriously. He was the man with a plan, and he was sticking to it.

Romney scored the most points in the debate. It didn’t really matter if he was talking about his health care law in Massachusetts or Dodd-Frank – he was clear, articulate, and well-reasoned (if not a bit too garrulous at times). When Huntsman tried to charge Romney with being a money man, Romney replied that Bain Capital launched Staples and Sports Authority – stores all of middle America knows. Romney also talked about the middle class while others waltzed amidst abstractions. He made the most sense to the most people.

Cain came in a close second by keeping the focus on his plan, while pointing out that others didn’t have much of a plan. He was clear and had a response to every critic. His main weakness is that he’s tried too hard to focus on 9-9-9. He has views on other topics, as his lengthy appearance on Fox’s “On the Record” with Greta van Susteren showed last night, but by drawing all the attention to his plan, he has invited more intense scrutiny of it. We can expect even more scrutiny in coming days.

Rick Perry was the biggest loser in the debate because he didn’t score any real wins – and everyone knew he needed a TKO or two in order to revive his campaign. He wandered a couple of times around an energy-based economic growth strategy and through a bit of health care policy. But he managed to remain fairly forgettable. He looked tired, if not more relaxed and comfortable than the last debate. We can expect him to slide in the polls even more this week. The only thing he has going for him is the $17 million he has raised.

The other candidates didn’t win or lose much. Jon Huntsman cracked his silly jokes, Michele Bachmann talked about her foster children and experience as a tax attorney again, and Rick Santorum made good points while appearing too angry. Newt Gingrich does well in the debates and almost appears to forget he’s running for President, mistaking himself for a participant in a high-level policy panel at an AEI conference. And Ron Paul made his trademark points about the Fed and monetary policy, offering viewers nothing new.

So, all of this means we can expect to see Romney increase his lead with Cain nipping at his heels – while everyone else slips farther back.