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Election 2012 Pop Quiz!
By Nicholas D. Kristoff
June 27, 2012
Now that it’s clear that the
presidential election will be between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, let’s see
how much you know of the candidates. Take my presidential quiz, and if you get
them all right, I nominate you to be a White House aide.
In each case, identify
whether it was Obama or Romney who made the statement.
1. On abortion: “I
will preserve and protect a woman’s right to
choose and am devoted and dedicated to honoring my word in that regard.”
2. “I am fighting for an overturning of Roe v. Wade.”
3. On gay rights: “As we seek to establish full equality for America’s gay
and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my
opponent.”
4. On the 2009 economic
stimulus: “No time, nowhere, no how.”
5. “There is need for economic stimulus. Americans have lost about
$11 trillion in net worth. That translates into about $400 billion a year less
spending that they’ll be doing. ... Government can help make that up in a very
difficult time. And that’s one of the reasons why I think a stimulus program is
needed.”
6. On climate science: “I
believe that climate change is occurring — the reduction in the size of
global ice caps is hard to ignore. I also believe that human activity is a
contributing factor.”
7. “Do I think
the world’s getting hotter? Yeah, I don’t know that, but I
think that it is. ... I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans. ... What
I’m not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don’t know
the answer to.”
8. On health care: “It’s
critical to insure more people in this country. It doesn’t
make sense to have 45 million people without insurance. It’s not good for
them because they don’t get good preventative care ... but it’s not good
for the rest of the citizens either, because if people aren’t insured, they go to
the emergency room for their care when they get very sick. That’s expensive.
They don’t have any insurance to cover it. So guess who pays? Everybody else.”
9. On financial bailouts: “The
idea of trying to bail out an institution to protect the
shareholders or to protect a certain interest group, that’s a terrible idea.
And that shouldn’t happen.”
10. “TARP
got paid back, and it kept the financial
system from collapsing. ... Well, it was the right thing to do.”
The answers? I’ll tell you in
a moment, but first let me say that, by now, we have a pretty good feel for how
I governs. Democrats and Republicans may disagree about him, but they largely
know what they’re getting.
In contrast, Romney is an
enigma. He was a moderate governor of Massachusetts,
but he has tried very hard to prove to right-wing conservatives that he is one
of them. So a crucial question for voters: Which is the real Romney?
Personally, my hunch is that
the real Romney is the pragmatist, the nonideological problem-solver. I can
imagine him as the political equivalent of a management consultant, where your
job is to go in and fix messes without worrying too much about partisanship or
ideology. Romney’s old friends and colleagues tell me that’s the Romney they
know — and that the one in the Republican primaries was a fraud.
Further evidence for the
moderate Romney: Before entering politics, he
was a registered independent, and in 2002 he declared, “People recognize that I am not a partisan
Republican, that I’m someone who is moderate, and that my views are
progressive.”
I’m also reassured by many of
Romney’s advisers. He mostly seeks advice from
smart center-rightists, such as Gregory Mankiw of
Harvard or Glenn Hubbard of Columbia
among economists.
Yet there are strong
counterarguments that worry me. The first is that the early Romney may have
been the false one. He may have been a centrist only to be viable in a liberal
state like Massachusetts.
Or Romney may have evolved, with the Republican Party itself, to become more
ideological. Or after all his time in the Republican primary echo chamber, he
may have come to believe his own rhetoric.
A broader worry is that
presidents inevitably empower their political parties, and, in Romney’s case,
that would be a Republican Party that today makes no pretense of moderation. As Jeb
Bush suggested recently, Republicans today would not
provide a comfortable home even for President Ronald Reagan — and that will be
even more true without centrists like Senators Richard Lugar and Olympia Snowe
in office.
So, Governor Romney, a simple
question: Who are you? Which of these quotations above reflect the real you? If
you’re elected, will we get Moderate Romney or Hard-liner Romney?
And the quiz? It illustrates
the problem: Every single statement was made by Romney.
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