I'm a big fan of Ezra Klein because he takes complicated issues and makes them understandable by eliminating all the noise and getting to the heart and facts about what is being debated. Just like many here, I am amazed at how so many people can fall for all the lies that Mitt Romney has been telling. I can't comprehend how anyone doesn't see through Romney's confabulations. Ezra Klein usually writes for The Washington Post, but in an op-ed for Bloomberg he provides a theory about what's going on and why Mitt Romney seems to be surging in the polls.
Republican nominee Mitt Romney can tell you exactly what he wants to do, but barely a word about how he’ll do it. President Barack Obama can’t describe what he wants to achieve, but he can tell you everything about how he’ll get it done. At this point, Romney and Obama are running almost perfectly opposite campaigns.
(snip)
Obama strategists think the American people are done with sweeping promises and transformative rhetoric. Voters are willing to believe Obama couldn’t have gotten much more done given the state of the economy and the intransigence of the Republicans, but they’re not willing to believe that a second term will somehow redeem the high hopes of the first. Obama has to run a more humble campaign, his strategists contend, because he must show that he has been tempered by experience and realism.
(snip)
Conversely, Romney’s campaign agenda appears huge. He wants root-and-branch reform of the tax code, including a 20 percent across-the-board cut to marginal tax rates. He wants to reduce federal spending to 20 percent of gross domestic product and balance the budget. He wants to convert Medicare to a voucher program, make Medicaid a block-grant program, and repeal the health-care law and hand responsibility to the states.
Romney Beats Obama on Hope
I've reached my limit of direct quotes, so you're going to have to read the entire op-ed for yourself. Do you agree with Ezra's conclusion?
It might be that polls and focus groups have given the Obama campaign reason to retreat from presenting a bold agenda for a second term. But the dulling of the vision has led to the dulling of the candidate. A quick glance at the polls suggests voters don’t seem to like that much, either.
To add a counter-balance to what Ezra Klein has observed, I read a piece in
Time by Republican strategist Mike Murphy who claims that Romney is going to win the presidential race:
For Romney, there is a potential precedent for all this. In 2002 he turned around a losing race for governor of Massachusetts at about this stage. That year, many imagined Mitt to be nothing more than the awkward loser badly beaten by Ted Kennedy in the 1994 Senate race. Local pundits, totally disconnected with voters, thought Mitt was too probusiness, too GOP and too Mormon to win the Bay State. But then Romney started agreeing to TV debates, where he made his case. Mitt surged, winning by five points. Romney is a horse who breaks late and runs hard. And late is now.
Goodbye, Mr. Scissorhands: Romney Recaptures Centrist Image