If Romney wins the presidency and the economy begins to rebound, Republicans will argue, and America’s experience will seem to show, that they were right all along: The stimulus was useless and the regulatory uncertainty the Obama administration created with its health-care plan and its talk of cap-and-trade and all the rest kept businesses from investing. Of course, if Obama keeps the office, that argument will be largely discredited, and he’ll be able to make the case that he and his party steered the country through incredible choppy waters despite relentless obstructionism from the Republicans — oh, and in 2014, he’ll also give 32 million Americans health-care insurance, just another little side project he got done while saving the economy.
President Obama is slowly rolling back the doctrine of Reaganomics. The long-term goal of the administration is to reverse this highly entrenched policy mindset. It’s a doctrine that mandates deregulation, “government is the problem,” lower taxes for the rich, a suffocation of the middle class and so forth. If Romney wins, that’s the end of that. Romney will be able to ride the progress of the Obama recovery and claim credit for it while simultaneously repealing and rolling back everything the president accomplished.
