Mitt Romney was mic-checkedat a $50,000 a plate fundraiser in Florida. Those high ticket donors are entitled to know what he will cut in the Federal budget but if 'the regular people' find out, they might not vote for Mitt. Romney went into a previously unheard level of detail on what he might cut. He singled out HUD and the Department of Education.
"I'm going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I'm probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go," Romney said. "Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later. But I'm not going to actually go through these one by one. What I can tell you is, we've got far too many bureaucrats. I will send a lot of what happens in Washington back to the states."
>"The Department of Education: I will either consolidate with another agency, or perhaps make it a heck of a lot smaller. I'm not going to get rid of it entirely," Romney said, explaining that part of his reasoning behind preserving the agency was to maintain a federal role in pushing back against teachers' unions. Romney added that he learned in his 1994 campaign for Senate that proposing to eliminate the agency was politically volatile.
Romney told the audience he remembers his experience from 1994 of Ted Kennedy calling him uncaring for suggesting cuts to education and does not intend to make the same mistake by revealing what his plans would be.
Ben Adler illustrates Romney's strategy of trying to get elected by, not shaking the Etch a Sketch so much as keeping his plans hidden from the public. Just like his taxes.
Romney expounded on that lesson — that he shouldn't publicly admit to his plans to leave society's most vulnerable citizens without any federal support — in a March interview with The Weekly Standard. "One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don't care about education," said Romney. "So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I'm not going to give you a list right now." In other words, Romney believes that if he tells the public what he might actually do in office they will dislike his plans and reject them. This is just as revealing as Romney's infamous recollection that he told his gardener not to use illegal immigrants on his property because "I'm running for office, for Pete's sake." Romney doesn't want to wage an honest contest between his ideas and his opponent's. His self-described preference is to try to win by telling the American they can have tax cuts without painful sacrifices on spending.
What Romney has let on is that he would cut the deduction for interest on a second home mortgage. Which will not make a dent in the deficit.
That's bad enough. But what is even worse is that what he offers in private doesn't add up either. It would be one thing if Romney had a secret plan to balance the budget with drastic spending cuts to major federal programs. While it would be dishonorable of him to refuse to discuss that plan while running for president, at least you would know he has a plausible — if totally heartless — plan for governing once elected.