Unserious: Herman Cain (l.) dismisses the idea that candidates should know foreign policy, while Mitt Romney pretends he’ll build a border fence. (Reuters)
Memo to the Republican field: You’re running for president. Of the United States. Of America. Start acting like it.
Stop proposing nonsense tax plans that won’t work. Stop making ridiculous attention-getting ads that might be minimally acceptable if you were running for county supervisor in Oklahoma. Stop saying you’re going to build a US-Mexico border fence you know perfectly well you’re not going to build.
Give the GOP electorate and the American people some credit. This country is in terrible shape. They know it. You know it. They want solutions. You’re providing comedy.
This is a serious time. It requires serious leaders. Where’s the gravity?
The reason that many on the Right have spent the year hunting somewhere, anywhere, for better candidates to challenge President Obama is becoming ever more plain with each passing day.
Herman Cain now leads in at least one major poll. He released his first TV commercial on Monday. In it, his campaign manager talks about how different the campaign is, then lights up a cigarette and exhales the smoke in a curlicue. Next comes a shot of Cain smiling devilishly.
It’s impossible not to like Cain. But this ad is a humiliating embarrassment. This is his moment, and rather than rising to it, he’s behaving as though even he can’t imagine he’ll one day sit in the Oval Office. He discards positions when they are inconvenient, and speaks dismissively of the notion that a presidential candidate ought to know something about foreign policy.
These are not the actions of a serious man. Good October poll data or not, if he doesn’t take himself seriously, few will once voting commences.
The candidate from whom Cain has picked up much of the slack, Rick Perry, just unveiled a major proposal that is also an embarrassment. It’s a flat-tax plan that isn’t really a flat tax.
You can pick and choose between his plan and the current tax code. If you make less than $500,000 a year, you can still take three major deductions — mortgage interest, state and local taxes and charitable donations.
Flat? This isn’t flat. The intellectual virtue of the flat tax (which is problematic in other ways) is its coherent simplicity: no deductions. Keep deductions, and the tax is no longer flat.
Perry’s team also threw in policy goodies meant to make conservatives swoon — the elimination of the estate tax and ending the disastrous policy of attaching the key health-care tax break to employers rather than to individuals. Those may be good ideas, but they’re only workable in a system in which the tax code has been completely flattened — which this plan doesn’t do.
Any major overhaul of the tax code — and one will certainly be needed over the next decade — will require a complex phase-in period. But Perry’s campaign said yesterday that it expects most people will simply choose the 20 percent flat rate, so a President Perry won’t really have to eliminate the current system.
So there will be two parallel tax systems. But this doesn’t simplify matters at all, since there are already two parallel tax systems (one is called the Alternative Minimum Tax). And as now, the fact of the two systems creates perverse competitive incentives for government — exactly what the flat tax is supposed to eliminate.
Perry’s refusal to pick and choose with his non-flat, optional “flat tax” constitutes an act of egregious cynicism. He wants the credit for proposing something bold while denying that any such boldness will have palpable consequences as well as benefits.
Yet a truly flat tax will necessarily raise taxes on middle-income earners and lower them on those making more money. Rather than acknowledge this and do the hard work of explaining why and how a flat tax will work to create the economic growth that will get us out of this morass, Perry simply wishes the hard work away.
Like a conventional politician at a conventional moment, he’s simply designed a grab bag of goodies. But this isn’t a conventional moment.
Mitt Romney is guilty, too. He has cynically used the immigration issue against Perry in part by announcing he will build a border fence. He won’t. The fact that he says he will helps explain why he’s now losing ground to Cain.
Romney’s fundamental lack of principle is overpowering as well. Yesterday, in Ohio, he refused to say whether he opposes a ballot initiative now headed for easy passage next month — an initiative that would reverse an Ohio law passed earlier this year ending collective bargaining for state workers. It was shepherded through by Republicans over vociferous Democratic and liberal objections.
On his Facebook page in June, Romney said he supported the law. But now that it’s polling badly, he wants to slink away from his earlier support.
Enough with the foolishness. Stop it. Stop it now.