Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has highlighted Romney's latest flipflop. After lots of talk of vetoing unnecessary spending and cutting government redudancies, now Romney is promising BIGGER government and federal props for failing industries. He's found his new voice!
See Jacoby's column, "What would Reagan say?" (1-20-08). Excerpt:
... Romney's message used to be one of unabashed small-government conservatism: "Government is simply too big. State government is too big. The federal government is too big. It's spending too much." Those words still appear on his website, but there was nothing like them in his remarks last week. He told his supporters that Washington is broken and needs to be fixed - which is decidedly not the same as saying it needs to be shrunk. Romney used to boast of the hundreds of spending line-items he vetoed as Massachusetts governor; "I like vetoes," he told audiences. But these days he's singing from a different hymnal....
But it is Romney whose pitch has shifted the most as he (again) seems to be reinventing himself, this time as a big-government planner with more faith in the power of top-down federal intervention than in the innovations and efficiencies of the free market.
In Detroit last week, Romney vowed to resurrect the moribund US auto industry - which has been declining for decades - with massive corporate welfare and other government largesse. He derided as "baloney" McCain's blunt reality check that many auto manufacturing jobs are gone for good. He condemned "the absence of a federal policy designed to strengthen the US automotive sector," sounding for all the world as if he just stepped out of some 1970s statist time warp. He promised "a fivefold increase - from $4 billion to $20 billion - in our national investment in energy research, fuel technology, materials science, and automotive technology."...
Read more...
