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Darrell Delamaide's Political Capital Archives | Email alerts
Jan. 25, 2012, 12:39 p.m. EST
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By Darrell Delamaide
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) "” As Florida Republicans get ready for their primary next week, the choice voters will face in November has already become very clear regardless who wins that high-stakes contest.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Barack Obama, while citing the twin foreign-policy achievements of ending the war in Iraq and eliminating Osama bin Laden, focused on the U.S. economy and proposed a number of pragmatic steps to support the recovery.
The Republicans' debate Monday in Tampa was largely about ideology. The four remaining presidential hopefuls argued about what capitalism is, what conservatism is, where consulting ends and lobbying begins, and how much tax one should pay, among other things.
So whether Florida decides in favor of Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, the choice for voters in the general election is shaping up as one between a pragmatic Obama and an ideological Republican.
It is a given that we have high unemployment and a sluggish recovery as a result of the unprecedented financial collapse in 2008. The economy's on the mend, and the question is what happens next.
Obama on Tuesday put forth a number of proposals for strengthening education, rebuilding infrastructure, exploiting energy resources and recalibrating our tax incentives "” all designed to revive manufacturing, repatriate jobs and make the country more competitive in a global economy. Read the text of Obama's State of the Union address.
"We know how to fix it," was the refrain in Obama's speech, whether he was referring to a reform of the tax code to end incentives for exporting jobs, establish training programs to provide needed job skills, or reward good teachers and keep high-school students from dropping out. It was a pragmatic approach.
On the Republican side, Romney promised to repeal Obama's health reform and balance the budget without explaining how this helps solve our unemployment problem or restore the economy. Gingrich emphasizes the need to end "entitlements" by limiting food stamps and putting kids to work as school janitors.
Meanwhile, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, the dream candidate of Republican pundits who don't like either of those hopefuls, said late Tuesday that government debt is the problem, even though as budget director for President George W. Bush he set the nation on a path to run up that very same debt.
In the Jan. 31 Florida primary, the state's substantial Hispanic population will test the remaining field of Republican presidential candidates. (AP photo: Matt Rourke.)
It was a grim Daniels who gave the official Republican response to Obama's State of the Union. He accused the president of adding "trillions to an already unaffordable national debt." He declared: "No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours."
Says who? The Republicans seem ready to base their campaign on an ideological assertion that has no demonstrable basis in fact, or at least none they have demonstrated.
"We are only a short distance behind Greece, Spain, and other European countries now facing economic catastrophe," claimed the governor of Indiana, who declined to seek his party's presidential nomination in spite of numerous calls to do so. Read the full text of Daniels' remarks.
Prove it. The U.S. is nothing like Greece and only remotely like Japan, which has remained relatively prosperous for years with much higher debt levels than we will ever reach.
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Darrell Delamaide writes a weekly column on politics that affect financial markets. He has written for Barrons, Dow Jones, Institutional Investor, Bloomberg... Expand
Darrell Delamaide writes a weekly column on politics that affect financial markets. He has written for Barrons, Dow Jones, Institutional Investor, Bloomberg and others over a long career, and has been based for the last 10 years in Washington, D.C. Collapse
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