How Much Government Is Enough?

And so we bid a fond farewell to the first phase of the Republican presidential campaign. It ends in Iowa on Jan. 3, leaving hilarity, outrage and occasional, blistering moments of clarity in its wake. I will not linger on the carnival aspects of the race, from Donald Trump to Herman Cain. Those have stolen far too much attention. A more substantive contest has been going on just beneath the surface--a campaign featuring two men who could plausibly serve as President and some worthy implausibles. More important, this slightly subterranean campaign has placed some basic questions about the future of the Republic on the table.

The two plausible Presidents are Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, although Huntsman's decision to stay out of Iowa has, up to this point, robbed him of the interest his campaign deserves. He is a far more creative and perhaps conservative candidate than Romney. He has proposed the most thoughtful roster of policy initiatives of any candidate in the race. He has proposed flatter--though still progressive--taxes, fewer loopholes and a far more aggressive program to combat Wall Street autocracy and rebuild the American manufacturing sector.

He has flipped none of Romney's flops on social issues but offended the Rush Limbaugh base of the party early on by refusing to sign no-tax (or any other) pledges and refusing to recant his beliefs in evolution and global warming. His foreign policy views are smart and subtle. I've actually learned things listening to him during this campaign--which is exceedingly rare in the hugger-mugger of electoral politics--especially when he's talking about China and the imminent revival of U.S. manufacturing. His chances of surviving past New Hampshire are minimal, which is a shame. His ideas deserve broader consideration.

Romney is the Republican default position. His economic policies are plain vanilla--not very different from Barack Obama's, in fact, except for his requisite Republican opposition to higher taxes for the wealthy. To prove his bona fides with the wingers, Romney has empretzeled himself with foolish positions on immigration and foreign policy. And he has been at times rather cheesy in his assertions. He will routinely criticize Obama for supporting an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that returns to the 1967 borders, without adding Obama's crucial caveat: "with mutually agreed-upon land swaps." (The President's stance is exactly the same as that of every other U.S. President since Richard Nixon.) But that sort of truthlessness can be written off as campaign blather. Romney's a moderate; he won't run the country off a cliff. The fact is, the people who have the most to lose with a Romney presidency are the Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Fox News brigades, who accrue much bigger ratings when the President is a secret Muslim socialist leading the country toward bankruptcy and Shari'a.