Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: A vision for America's future

Visual source: Newseum

Drew Westen at The Los Angeles Times has a thought-provoking and controversial piece on the lack of a bold vision by either party for America's future:

[Franklin D. Rooselvelt] pulled no punches, laying blame for the country's financial woes squarely on Wall Street speculators ' and, by implication, on their benefactors in Washington. "They have no vision," he said, citing a passage from the Bible, "and when there is no vision, the people perish." [...]

Americans today aren't interested in slogans and sound bites. They want the candidates to offer them a vision, but so far neither Mitt Romney nor President Obama has done so.

Republicans are recycling tired promises from the Reagan era, preaching a gospel of small government and fiscal responsibility. But their words ring hollow. [...]  Americans may yet elect Romney, but it won't be because they really buy what he's selling.

Voters aren't hearing a clear message from Obama either. On the one hand, he's pushing for more stimulus, but he is also the architect of a "grand bargain" that will cut more than $2 trillion from the 2013 federal budget, imposing the same kind of "austerity" that has proved so counterproductive in Europe.

So why hasn't either candidate offered a clear vision that resonates with the American people?

I would argue that Romney has put forth a pretty clear vision of what his America would look like: a giant casino for the wealthy and for corporations to play with the lives and livelihood of the rest of us. It's probably Romney isn't really all that well-liked. From Neil King Jr. at The Wall Street Journal:

Can Mitt Romney pull a Bill Clinton? Can he go from generally disliked to well liked, all in a few months? His political fate may hinge on it. [...]

At this point, Mr. Romney is now minus six percentage points on the thermometer scale, meaning that 33% view him positively and 39% negatively'about where Mr. Clinton was going into the summer of 1992. [...]

Mr. Romney and Mr. Clinton are very different politicians. The vast sums now poured into negative political ads also make it tougher to woo skeptics to your side than was the case in 1992.

Mr. Romney still has time, even if he has to wait until his party's convention in late August, and his debate face-offs with Mr. Obama later in the fall.

The New York Times editorial board:

[W]hile they upheld the law's mandate for individuals to buy insurance under Congress's taxing power, the chief justice joined the four other conservatives to reject that provision under the Constitution's commerce clause.

That rejection underscores the aggressiveness of the majority's conservatism and marks a stunning departure from the long-established legal consensus that Congress has broad power to regulate the economy.

The court's conservatism calls to mind the defiance of the court in the 1930s when it regularly struck down New Deal statutes during the Great Depression. But there are important differences. The 1930s court saw itself as preserving established precedents and principles. The Roberts majority does not have that conservative role. Nor does it play the role of the 1960s court, whose rulings reinforced a relatively liberal trend in politics.

Ross Douhat at The New York Times:

Liberals have persuaded themselves that this unpopularity is largely the product of conservative misinformation and voter ignorance. But it's really a result of the gulf that opened in 2009 between the public's priorities and the president's agenda. By turning from economic crisis management to sweeping social legislation before the crisis had actually abated, Obama made himself look more ideological than practical and more liberal than pragmatic. By continuing to push for the largest possible bill even after the public backlash had elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts, he made himself look wildly out of touch as well.

This was not a mistake the icons of the liberal past made. Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent two years defining himself as a Depression-fighter before he set out to establish Social Security; Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Great Society amid an economic boom.

Had Obama followed Roosevelt's first-term example, the initial stimulus bill might have been broken up into smaller (and perhaps more popular) components, financial reform and perhaps tax reform would have preceded health care reform, and the kinds of jobs bills the White House demanded of a recalcitrant Republican Congress in 2011 might have been sought from a Democratic Congress in 2009 and 2010 instead. [...] But the Obama White House was convinced that it could fight the recession and rewrite the social compact all at once. And when the administration's economic policies didn't deliver as promised, it was almost inevitable that the focus on health care would cost Obama approval ratings, cost his party House seats ' and perhaps help cost him a second term as well.

Doyle McManus at The Los Angeles Times:

If Obama wins reelection, the Senate will still be key. Obama has already promised to veto any attempt to dismantle the law, a vow that presumably extends to a reconciliation bill. At that point, Senate leaders would need 67 votes to override a veto, almost surely an insuperable barrier.

But Republicans have another front they will pursue if Obama wins in November. Some GOP governors, including Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, are already waging guerrilla warfare, refusing to set up the state-administered insurance exchanges that are a key part of the law, which means the federal government will have to run the exchanges directly. Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant have said they may boycott the new law's expansion of Medicaid, the combined state and federal insurance plan for the poor ' something the Supreme Court ruling allows them to do. If resistance at the state level becomes widespread, it could create chaos and undermine the new system before it gets started.

Reuters analyzes the tax cut landscape:

Members of Congress from both parties are increasingly mulling the unthinkable: going home in December without acting to avoid the $4 trillion in tax hikes and deep spending cuts known as the fiscal cliff.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans claim this is their preferred option, as it could rattle global financial markets badly and anger their constituents.

But as they circle each other in an ever-more partisan atmosphere they see little prospect for a settlement acceptable to both parties in the lame duck session of Congress after the Nov. 6 election.

Speaking of Bush, Molly Hopper at The Hill points out that many GOP lawmakers want Romeny to distance himself from Bush, even though Romney wants to double down on Bush's failed policies:

Such a move, they say, would take away a key political advantage from President Obama, who has repeatedly suggested Romney would embrace Bush-like policies in the White House. [...]

The presumptive GOP presidential contender does not need to be disrespectful in opposing prior Bush programs and policies, wrote Jonah Goldberg in a column for the National Review titled, 'Memo to Mitt: Run Against Bush.'