Something changed on Tuesday night with Mitt Romney’s three primary state victories, and it wasn’t just the all-but-universal acknowledgment that he’ll be the Republican nominee.
In his speech in Wisconsin, Romney finally found the right argument to use against Barack Obama — indeed, located the very specific dividing line between the president and his opposition that Republicans and conservatives have been trying to draw for four years now.
The president, Romney said, has “spent the last four years laying the foundation for a new government-centered society.”
“Government-centered society” isn’t the most felicitous phrase, nor the most memorable sound-bite. But that may be for the best. What it lacks in mellifluousness, it makes up for in deadly accuracy.
Every major initiative of the Obama presidency has placed the government at the center of the policy the president wishes to effect and the change he wishes to see. Its policies have not necessarily put government in charge, or given government total control; but they have made government a dominating presence.
First came the stimulus package in 2009 — a direct $860 billion infusion into the economy. The lion’s share of those dollars did not go toward lubricating the machinery of job growth but rather directly into the coffers to state and local governments to balance their books.
The $100 billion bailout of two US auto companies led to the president and his team literally choosing which kinds of cars those companies should be making — determining the level of union compensation and unilaterally changing the rules of the private contracts into which the companies had entered with their debtors.
And finally and most directly, ObamaCare uses government power to direct every American to purchase a health-insurance policy. It creates state-level “exchanges” that will function as government-managed insurance companies. And it empowers a cost-savings board of advisers who will design centralized rules for the distribution of health-care services.
Obama hasn’t nationalized the auto industry or the health-care industry, nor did he assume control of the economy via the stimulus. What he has sought to do is enmesh government, the economy and the citizenry in a new way.
That is why Romney’s “government-centered society” is a brilliant stroke, why it’s going to stick — and why Obama’s partisans and Obama himself aren’t going to be able to shake it off so easily.
It has been difficult for the right to define its ideological discontent with Obama in a way that might be convincing to those who don’t think in ideological terms.
Obama is more than just a standard-issue liberal, but less than a European social democrat. He has a centrist’s cool temperament, but a statist’s bald confidence. So what is he?
In a 2010 Commentary magazine article, Jonah Goldberg playfully dubbed Obama a “neo-Socialist” — whose relation to socialism mirrored the relationship of the neoconservatives of the 1970s to old-fashioned conservatism.
“In much the same way that neoconservatives accepted a realistic and limited role for the government, Obama tolerates a limited and realistic role for the market: its wealth is necessary for the continuation and expansion of the welfare state and social justice,” Goldberg wrote. “While neoconservatism erred on the side of trusting the nongovernmental sphere — mediating institutions like markets, civil society, and the family — neosocialism gives the benefit of the doubt to government.”
That is what Romney is trying to say about Obama without deploying the all-too-hot “s” word, and in a way that will be meaningful to Americans who might mistake “neosocialist” for the name of Keanu Reeves’ character in “The Matrix.”
The strength of the Romney approach is that it redirects the line of attack from Obama personally to his philosophy and his vision for the United States.
By contrast, Romney says, “I will spend the next four years rebuilding the foundation of an opportunity society led by free people and free enterprises.”
That’s not especially felicitous, either. But it offers voters a clear and unambiguous choice, which is Romney’s major challenge.
And so the argument begins.