Both British and US interests would be best served by a victory for Mitt Romney
By Daniel Hannan
American pollsters will tell you that the presidential candidate who is in the
lead going into the party conventions usually wins. Four polls last week
showed a tiny lead for Barack Obama, two for Mitt Romney and one was level;
all seven were well within the margin of error.
Another rule is that the Gallup poll taken 100 days before the poll foretells the winner. Only once in the past 60 years – the Bush-Dukakis race of 1988 – did that predictor fail. So, what did Gallup show on the date in question? A dead heat, with both candidates on 46 per cent.
Many Europeans wonder why Mr Obama is not comfortably ahead. Most media, both within the US and abroad, portray him as a serene statesman being shouted at by angry Tea Partiers in 18th-century fancy dress. Viewed solely through the medium of a television screen, he seems bigger than his Republican critics. They are presented as a gaggle of anti-abortionists, stump-toothed mountain men and crackpots hoarding gold against the presumed collapse of paper currencies – an extremist coalition led by a plutocrat. Seen from abroad, it looks like an election between Dr Hibbert and Montgomery Burns.
Then again, we don’t have to live with Mr Obama’s domestic policies. We see him doing what he does best: making speeches, carrying out ceremonial duties and reminding the world, simply by holding office, that America had the spirit to move in one generation from the formalised exclusion of black voters to the election of a mixed-race president.
It was largely on these grounds that I supported Mr Obama four years ago. I was distressed by the Republican Party’s abandonment of free markets for crony capitalism. I thought that Mr Obama’s election would wipe away the stain of segregation. And, frankly, I enjoyed his speeches.
Four years on, the speeches are starting to grate. Americans are tiring of
their leader’s charm, much as we tired of Tony Blair’s. When demanding a
trillion-dollar stimulus package at the start of his term, Mr Obama promised
that it would bring unemployment down to below 5.6 per cent; today, the
figure stands at 8.3 per cent. He pledged, in that slightly millenarian
manner of his, to halve the deficit. Four years on, the deficit has fallen
from $1.3 trillion to, er, $1.2 trillion. America’s credit rating has been
downgraded as $5 trillion has been added to the national debt.
These are indescribable sums. There are no superlatives that can adequately
convey what a $16 trillion national debt means. But Americans don’t need to
wrap their minds around the statistics to know that they are worse off than
they were 12 months ago, and will be yet worse off 12 months from now.
The real question is not why Mr Obama isn’t comfortably ahead, but why Mr
Romney isn’t. When 64 per cent of Americans say that they expect their
standard of living to decline under Mr Obama, and when Mr Romney enjoys a
19-point lead on economic competence, the election ought to be a walkover.
Why isn’t it?
Largely because, so far, the campaign hasn’t really been about the economy.
Before the Republican convention, the main news story was about a Republican
senate candidate called Todd Akin who had made some idiotic remarks about
rape – remarks which he immediately withdrew, which were universally
condemned by the rest of his party and which concern a subject that is, in
any case, wholly beyond the remit of the White House. The week before, the
main issue had been gay marriage – again, a topic that has nothing to do
with the federal government, being within the jurisdiction of the 50 states.
I can understand why Democrat strategists want to talk about something other
than their economic record. As a delegate from Idaho said to me at the
Republican convention this week: “Now I know how they must have felt when we
kept talking about John Kerry.”
Mr Romney has been attacked as a shill for Wall Street, a vulture capitalist
who takes pleasure in sacking people and (whisper it) a member of a strange
cult that baptises the dead.
On Thursday night, rather late in the campaign, he answered his critics.
Members of his congregation stepped forward to tell of the many acts of
kindness and generosity that his faith had inspired, including his regular
visits to a dying 14-year-old boy. If we didn’t already know about these
things, ran the subtext, it was because Mitt Romney was naturally modest.
Similarly, entrepreneurs lined up to praise the way his company had got
their businesses started. It makes sense: religious toleration is drilled
into Americans by their history, their constitution and their natural good
manners, and the whispers against Mr Romney’s Mormonism have prompted a
backlash from all creeds. Similarly, the sneers about his business record
are starting to jar in a country where making a profit is regarded, I’m glad
to say, as laudable rather than culpable.
Mr Romney’s team want to portray him as a competent, traditional, pro-business
Republican. “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the
oceans and heal the planet,” Mr Romney told delegates in Tampa. “My promise
is to help you and your family.” It makes sense. If you needed a plumber,
would you send for the better orator or the more skilled technician?
Mr Romney is not a natural speech-maker. Once or twice during his address, I
found my attention wandering. Then my eye would fall on the horrifying debt
clock hanging over the hall and I’d remember quite how important this
election is.
From a British point of view, the choice should be straightforward. Mr Obama
made clear in his book, Dreams From My Father, that he had a low opinion of
us, and has acted accordingly, removing Winston Churchill’s bust from the
Oval Office, backing Argentina’s demands for sovereignty talks over the
Falklands, raging at an imaginary company called “British Petroleum” during
the Gulf oil spill. Mr Romney, by contrast, is an old-fashioned Republican
when it comes to foreign policy: he knows who America’s friends are.
There is, though, a much stronger reason for wanting him to win. Focused as we
are on what the Chancellor calls the “chilling effect” of the euro crisis,
we rarely consider the possibility of a similar crisis in the United States.
Yet, if we employ the measure used to calculate the Maastricht criteria, the
US has a larger national debt than Greece’s. And whereas a Greek default
might be managed as a controlled explosion, a collapse in the US would blow
the world economy to splinters.
Whether Mitt Romney can eliminate the deficit is not clear. What is beyond
doubt, though, is that Mr Obama cannot. His four years have left America
poorer, less happy and less free. As Clint Eastwood told Republican
delegates: “Politicians are employees of ours – and if somebody does not do
the job, we gotta let ’em go.”
In a television interview after Mr Romney’s speech, the presenter asked me
whether it was possible to win on an austerity message. Hadn’t the Greeks
just punished the politicians who suggested deep budget cuts? “Yes,” I told
him, “but Americans aren’t Greeks. We expect better of you.”
Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP
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