Good for Mitt Romney, attacking President Obama’s crony capitalism. Too bad there’s no evidence that a President Romney would do anything to stop it.
“We’re seeing our president hand out money to the businesses of campaign contributors,” Romney said in a campaign speech Tuesday. Romney called this “crony capitalism,” and declared, “That is wrong and it’s got to stop.”
A Romney Web ad also whacked Obama over solar panel maker Solyndra, which failed despite generous federal subsidies, pointing out that the company’s largest investor, George Kaiser, was a bundler for Obama’s 2008 campaign.
“When billions upon billions of dollars are given by the Obama administration to the businesses of campaign contributors,” Romney said in a Fox News interview on Monday, “that’s a real problem.”
Romney surrogates also are making the same case. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli hosted a conference call hammering away at Obama’s subsidies to donors and bundlers.
But that conference call highlighted the problem in this line of attack. When reporters asked Cuccinelli what Romney would do to prevent crony capitalism in the future, the AG had no specifics.
Why should anyone put much stock in GOP attacks on Obama’s cronyism when Romney can’t say how he would make the cronyism stop?
Romney hasn’t presented a plan to slow the revolving door whereby lobbyists become public servants doling out taxpayer money before returning to K Street. Obama’s 2008 promises to fix the revolving door — promises he’s broken — gave him cross-partisan appeal. Romney could tap into that same well of good-government, cleanup-the-system constituency if he pledged to deliver where Obama has failed.
Not only is Romney not talking the good-government talk, he’s not walking the walk, either. Unlike every other major party nominee since 2000, Romney is refusing to disclose any of his bundlers — volunteer fundraisers — except for registered lobbyists, whose names he’s legally required to disclose.
Romney could propose plenty of ethics reforms that don’t attempt to curb political speech as Democrats’ bills do. For instance, Romney could propose a lifetime ban on former congressmen or Cabinet members becoming lobbyists.
Romney could call for instant, online reporting of campaign contributions that includes bundler data. He could promise an executive order barring bundlers and high-dollar donors from lobbying the executive branch at all. These sorts of proposals, which go beyond Obama’s reforms, would put some substance behind Romney’s attacks on Obama’s crony capitalism.
Ethics reforms would be mere garnishes, though, on the one real reform to stop this sort of crony capitalism: the “one overarching rule” to wipe out political patronage that Cuccinelli said didn’t exist.
In order to stop the flow of subsidies to politically connected businesses, Romney should simply stop the flow of subsidies.
Romney could abolish the green energy loan guarantee program — originally created by President George W. Bush, later expanded by Obama’s stimulus — under which Solyndra got its subsidies. While he’s at it, Romney could end loan guarantees for nuclear energy. If he really wants to end crony capitalism, he should also end the largest loan guarantee program in the country, the Export-Import Bank, which subsidizes exports, mostly Boeing jets.
That would change the dynamic of the race: Romney attacking Obama’s crony capitalism and promising to end it by stopping corporate welfare.
But Romney isn’t taking this path, and we shouldn’t expect him to. Cuccinelli came the closest on Wednesday when he told me Romney thinks programs like the Solyndra one “should get smaller, simpler and more transparent.” All signs suggest Romney still believes government should “support” business.
Congressman-turned-lobbyist Vin Weber, a senior adviser to the Romney campaign, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed this spring lauding Ex-Im’s loan guarantees. Romney supports ethanol subsidies. His 2010 book, “No Apologies,” supports federal subsidies for “infant industries.”
With no broad plan to pull government out of industry and no framework for ethics reform, Romney offers only a lame promise to end cronyism: I won’t do it the way Obama did it. As Cuccinelli put it Monday, “You really need to elect someone who’s committed to weeding it out.”
Romney harps so much on Solyndra’s bankruptcy that at times it sounds as if the real problem was not that the company got a government guarantee, but instead that it got a guarantee and then failed.
If Romney wants to get traction on the cronyism attack, he needs to learn what conservatives have long known: If you want to get rid of corruption in high places, you have to get rid of the high places.
Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.
