The upside of down

Shorter David Brooks:

Since Romney is totally free of principles, he'd make a much more effective president than Obama.

Today he's Mr. Savvy, building a picture of how the legislative wheels would turn under the two different candidates, which he can totally do, thanks to his vast experience of sitting around the table with George Stephanopoulos and John McCain.

"Cliffs of Insanity" (The Princess Bride): The Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland.

He still hasn't found out, though, that we are scheduled to tumble into that fiscal abyss almost three weeks before the inauguration:

The first order of business would be the budget deal, averting the so-called fiscal cliff. Obama would first go to Republicans in the Senate and say, “Look, we’re stuck with each other. Let’s cut a deal for the sake of the country.” He would easily find 10 Republican senators willing to go along with a version of a Grand Bargain.

Well, the fiscal cliff will have been averted already by then, if it is going to be averted, by the old congress, as Obama insists it will. And if it hasn't been, we'll all be dragging our shattered limbs across the fiscal canyon floor, praying for rescue, and the mood in the Senate is going to be rather anxious, with the horrified calls coming not just from Medicare patients and library users but also from their dear friends in the arms and aerospace industries.

But let that pass.

Then Obama would go to the House. He’d ask Eric Cantor, the majority leader, if there were votes for such a deal. The answer would probably be no. Republican House members still have more to fear from a primary challenge from the right than from a general election challenge from the left. Obama is tremendously unpopular in their districts.

Again this difficulty with understanding time. It's going to be a newly elected House, at the moment of the term when the members are least concerned with primary challenges, and with more Democrats and fewer tea-o-phytes, all interpreting the results of their elections in ways that we cannot easily predict. Cantor may have mounted his coup effort against Boehner and become Speaker, or lost and become Nobody—Paul Ryan may have lost his seat!

And not all of them are going to be the same kind of Republican:

Just 45 of 83 of the Republican National Congressional Committee's current crop of so-called Young Guns have signed the no-tax pledge this election season, according to a Huffington Post analysis of pledge signatures. During the 2010 midterm elections, 81 of 92 of that Young Guns group signed the pledge.

Indeed, even the current crop has been entertaining some of that agonizing reappraisal, which is why the lame duck congress, as it will be next week, is working to make the fiscal precipice go away.

Anyway, Brooks expects this process to lead to a situation where little will get accomplished:

By running such a negative presidential campaign, Obama has won no mandate for a Grand Bargain. Obama himself is not going to suddenly turn into a master legislative craftsman on the order of Lyndon Johnson.

There’d probably be a barrage of recriminations from all sides. The left and right would be consumed with ire and accusations. Legislators would work out some set of fudges and gimmicks to kick the fiscal can down the road. The ensuing bitterness would doom any hopes for bipartisan immigration reform.

Ah, yes, of course! The old metaphorical switcheroo: transform that cliff into a can, and then all you need to do is kick it—by the time it turns back into a cliff we'll be campaigning for the next election.

And of course it's Obama's own fault anyway, with his awful negative campaigning. And being too fastidious to keep their peckers in his pocket (can't blame him on that one: I use my pockets). Instead of following their natural inclination to cooperate and make the world a better place, they will be provoked into sulking and getting nothing done at all, quite unlike their predecessors of the 112th Congress (for which Obama scarcely campaigned at all, negatively or otherwise, fearful of giving the impression that he liked Democrats better).

The rest of the Obama second term would be about reasonably small things: some new infrastructure programs; more math and science teachers; implementing Obamacare; mounting debt; a president increasingly turning to foreign affairs in search of legacy projects. If you’re a liberal Democratic, this is an acceptable outcome. Your party spent 80 years building the current welfare state. This outcome extends it.

"A liberal Democratic"? Brooks, you've gone and put the copy editor to sleep again!

Møns Klint, Denmark. Wikipedia.

And then if Romney is elected the situation is the other way around—he can make a deal with the House, to

take the reform agenda that Republican governors have pursued in places like Indiana and take it to the national level: structural entitlement reform; fundamental tax reform. These reforms wouldn’t make government unrecognizable...

but he'll have trouble with the Democratic-led Senate, and not only that: he'll be aware that he only won the election because he decided on Moderation at the last minute, while the Tea-ocrats lost in their Senate races in 2010 and "possibly" (Brooks thinks) this year; and he'll realize that he'll have a hard time repeating the feat in 2016, what with all the hordes of brown persons taking over the country and the diminution of the Republican family. But that won't faze Willard! He'll just make use of his Protean mind-shifting skills, and offer them something akin to Obama's historic compromise:

Romney’s shape-shifting nature would induce him to govern as a center-right moderate. To get his tax and entitlement reforms through the Democratic Senate, Romney would have to make some serious concessions: increase taxes on the rich as part of an overall reform; abandon the most draconian spending cuts in Paul Ryan’s budget; reduce the size of his lavish tax-cut promises. 

This would be startling to conservatives, and talk-show hosts would foam at the mouth, but the Republicans of the House wouldn't mind a bit:

Republicans in Congress would probably go along. They wouldn’t want to destroy a Republican president. Romney would champion enough conservative reforms to allow some Republicans to justify their votes.

Q.E.D.! if you like the Obama program, you should vote for Romney, because he's the guy who's capable of pushing it through: dropping punctuation in his excitement (wake up, copy editor!), he perorates:  

He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans.

Which may or may not be true. As far as that Broderian parody of Obama's program goes, unburdened by any actual beliefs as to what government ought to do, he is perfectly capable of adopting any program whatever, if he thinks it means victory in the Risk game of life. (Most men who get rich on that level want to pick up a trophy wife; Willard, who isn't that way inclined—isn't it odd how Mormons have no interest in serial polygamy, even though it's perfectly legal?—keeps looking for trophy jobs.)

But I don't think that 's what would happen. My feeling—when I think about that tax cut plan, and everybody running around saying, "Well, you'll have to raise taxes on the middle class! You'll have to cut defense! You'll have to reduce Medicare!" and Romney just smiling, perfectly certain that these awful things will not happen—is that it's basically more Bush, doubling and tripling the deficit, and hoping his friends on network TV don't call him out.

As for Brooks, it is really remarkable how clueless he is. (But if the copy editor can't stay awake through his column, maybe nobody at the Times can...)

Steep Cliffs at Dieppe. Claude Monet.