Off to War

Editorial of The New York Sun

Congratulations are in order to President and Mrs. Obama. It is hard for your grizzled editors to remember an election night in which so many distinguished prognosticators have been proven so wrong in their estimates of what was likely to happen. Let us but redouble our efforts. Even before the results came in it was being said that the defeat of Governor Romney would precipitate a “war” within the Republican Party. To which we can only say it’s another example of how every cloud has a silver lining.

Governor Romney is man of inspiring decency and morals, too decent to return the ad hominem attacks to which he was subjected. Yet it can also be said that voters renounced the notion that what this country needs is a businessman as president. No doubt they learned their lesson with Herbert Hoover and James Carter. We, for one, would rather be in the wilderness pursuing the right ideas than in power pursuing the wrong ideas. So we tend to see the coming fray within the camp that lost today as an opportunity to sort some things out.

We don’t buy for a minute the notion advanced by the New York Times that the vote was a rejection of Reaganite “bromides.” If so, why would America have re-installed the Republicans in command of the house of Congress that originates the budget? If the voters wanted tax hikes, why would they have re-elected the very House that has blocked them at every turn? Voters may have rejected Paul Ryan for vice president but they returned him to the House budget committee he chairs. What would be the logic for the House leadership to buckle now? Mr. Romney rarely argued the fiscal questions in the supply-side terms that Reagan used to win the White House (and JFK used to gain cuts in top marginal rates).

On immigration, Mr. Romney erred badly. Immigration, legal or otherwise, just wasn’t an issue over which Reagan lost a lot of sleep (his grandfather snuck into America from Ireland via Canada). Reagan grasped that immigration restrictions are protectionist. Our country is desperate for human capital. We need policies that liberate it and incentivize it. We need every immigrant we can get. Let other countries worry about losing their people. Mr. Romney’s self-deportation scheme seemed a bow to the xenophobic element.

What bothers us about the immigration error is not only the political blunder that led to the Hispanic vote going broadly against Mr. Romney. It’s also the error of philosophy, of political economy. Had Mr. Romney come up through the battle of ideas, instead of the battle of balance sheets, he would not, in our estimation, have made this error. It’s not transfer payments and ethnic politics that are at the core of the immigration debate. It’s human capital.

Mr. Romney’s biggest default was his failure to put Mr. Obama on the defensive over the collapse of the dollar. We understand we’re in a small minority even among conservatives on this head. We nonetheless see Mr. Romney’s decision to leave this issue on the table as one of the tragedies of the campaign. We had hoped he’d come around after telling Lawrence Kudlow that he wouldn’t second-guess the Federal Reserve chairman. He did come around part way; he declared he would appoint a new chairman to succeed Ben Bernanke.

Then he failed to attack. He made a few friendly, condescending nods to Congressman Ron Paul. The platform writers gave him, in its call for a new gold commission, a plank he could have stood on. Yet Mr. Romney seemed oblivious to history. There was 1896 to learn from; that’s the year the Democrat, Wm. Jennings Bryan, said he would not be crucified on a cross of gold. In the end, sound money vanquished the siren of inflation, as it always does. When Mr. Romney made his vow to label China a currency manipulator, the Wall Street Journal called him on it in an important editorial, noting that the “biggest ‘currency manipulator’ in the world today is the U.S. Federal Reserve.”

So if there’s going to be a “war” within the Republican camp, let us just say we need it. On foreign policy, Mr. Romney went into the debates agreeing with President Obama. He was too decent, too patriotic to take his politics beyond the water’s edge. We will see how Mr. Obama progresses with his approach in the coming term. There will be in the press plenty of Geoffrey Dawsons to cheer him on. These columns will oppose a peaceful settlement, that is, a settlement that requires us to treat with the Iranian mullahs. We don’t favor a war. What we favor is a free Iran. And a free China. The only war we are eager for is the one everyone says is coming within the Republican Party over the right ideas for the next campaign.