What is the best time period for framing Mitt’s unpopular positions?
Swing voters might not hold against Romney his 2012 need to out-pander the other candidates in Republican primaries.
But swing voters know that, during the past four years, when Romney the candidate kept running and pandering, Obama the President was governing, and confronting enemies abroad and at home.
So a good way to help swing voters compare these two men is to emphasize the ways that the 2008 version of Romney would have dug us even deeper into the hole that was the legacy of George W. Bush.
Below are my top 9. What are yours?
If Mitt Romney’s 2008 run for President had succeeded:
1. Bin Laden would still be alive, and enjoying videos of US troops getting killed by IEDs not only in Afghanistan, but also in in Iraq, Syria, Libya and probably Iran.
2. GM & its suppliers would have moved to China, where they would use Bain-owned sweatshop sub-contractors.
3. There would be even more home foreclosures, bigger “too big to fail” banks, and fewer local banks.
4. There would be no pro-choice Sotomayor on the Supreme Court, where Romney’s two appointees would have forced American women to travel as far as Mexico or Canada to get an abortion, and low-cost birth control pills.
5. Latino students would be deported unless they carried around their birth certificates.
6. The budget and trade deficits would be bigger, Republicans would have cheered, and the public would never have heard of the “debt ceiling”.
7. The earnings of millionaire hedge fund managers would be taxed at even lower rates than the 15% they enjoy under George W. Bush’s tax cuts, along with being exempt from the alternative minimum tax that bites hard on upper-middle incomes, and from the Social Security and Medicare taxes that bite hard on middle and lower earned income.
8. Romney’s super-low 2011 income tax rate owed would have been reduced even lower than the 12.2% he reported (on his declared $13,696,951 in adjusted gross income), and he would not have artificially added 1.9% to get to the 14.1% rate that he has promised – for now—to pay.
9. Romney would have supported a nationwide mandate to buy health insurance, but not insurance company profit limits and rebates to customers. Many Republicans would support this, and the rest would not "replace" it with anything besides leaving more sick Americans bankrupt, untreated, and dying in the streets.