Mitch Daniels gave a very good response to Obama yesterday. He took the right angles. There was cutting government by reducing spending on the wealthy rather than raising taxes to fund an unsustainably large state. He smartly argue that that Republicans were the party of both economic growth and a stable and fair welfare state while Democrats are the party that favors growth dampening tax increases and (in practice) putting old age entitlements on the road to collapse.
For those who are wondering, this is what drawing “sharp contrasts” really looks like. It isn’t Gingrich wondering about whether Obama has a “Kenyan anti-colonial” mindset. It isn’t Romney complaining about an Obama “apology tour.” The differences between sharply higher taxes, government-run health care and a cronyist/corporatist energy sector on one hand, and (comparatively) lower taxes, market-oriented health care reform and a pro-growth energy policy on the other, are big enough. These are, or course, only some of the differences. If you have real beliefs, you don’t need showy expressions of contempt for Obama that are really expressions of contempt for the people you are trying to get to vote for you.
RUN MITCH RUN
Letters
Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…