Romney and Europe

Just a few weeks more to go to the US presidential elections 2012. In the last leg of the race I've been thinking maybe Mr. Romney could use our help and support, "we" in this case being European conservatives. 

But wait a minute. While I've been thinking, Mr. Romney has been talking.

Some of the people he has talked about are Europeans, people who in his view exemplify exactly what NOT to be, or do. He is talking about socialists, of course. Now, we must admit there are people in this part of the world (Europe) who do deserve – or even claim - the label Socialist, and who have done much over the years to complicate – if not to say damage - the economies and social systems of our region. There are loads of people over here who have been allowed to make a living on government money (mostly legally, that's the rub), and who see it as their right to have others finance their life. The pattern Romney describes as all-European is familiar to us.

But it is not all-European. The European welfare state - introduced way back when by liberals and socialists (and supported only grudgingly by conservatives) - is embattled as never before, now that the world-wide economic crisis has caught up with it. And those of us who oppose the careless spending trend are not just marginal groups: among those in power today you will find the German Christian Democrats, the British Conservatives, the Swedish Moderates and the Finnish Moderates, to mention just a few. (No, I have not forgotten the French, the Greeks and the Spaniards – I just prefer to pass them by in silence at this point, for various reasons not explored further here).

Of course, in the US Republican worldview a European conservative is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. And one does not lightly provoke the adopted Truth in those quarters. Nor does Mr. Romney. He toes the line. As I perceive the GOP candidate, he is not in essence a leader, he is more like a follower, a successful follower of Republican core beliefs, who has succeeded in winning the nomination by following the right hints and leads during the primary season. So, Mr. Romney follows the inherited line and describes us Europeans, across the board, as a bunch of good-for-nothing welfare recipients. In this way he converts the symbol we represent (lazy welfare bums) into political energizers for his party's core.  Romney's use of the label "Europe" is a provocative red flag to stir his party friends, a muleta in Spanish terms, to rouse the fury and energy of the Republican toro and stop his recent slide in the polls. Good to know we can be useful for something.

More troubling to Mr. Romney is the sneaky revelation by his Democrat opponents that he has talked confidentially this spring about being willing to forgo the support of the “47” per cent of the electorate who pay no federal income tax. Apparently his intention was to identify a large segment of the electorate he felt were not his to win in any case, those he considered automatic Obama supporters. Unfortunately for Romney, his way of singling out such a segment happened to include a lot of his own potential supporters.

There is something here that seems to be part of Mr. Romney's inner persona – an intelligent man, yet sometimes bumbling or tripping when he seeks to express concepts and ideas. He may still be a good man in the presidency, if you feel comfortable with a probabilistic kind of leadership. That was Ronald Reagan's style. Roughly right, but not precisely, and at times ambiguous. If leadership is the standard, it may be pertinent in this connection to mention Romney's family dog, which he put in a wind-sheltered cage on the roof of his car for 12 hours going to Canada on vacation. The story has led the journalist who first published it to say it shows that Romney "functions on logic, not emotion" (Neil Swidey, Boston Globe, January 8, 2012.) A probabilistic leader who functions on logic sounds like something of a challenge to those he is to lead.

Is Mr. Romney, then, a thinking conservative? (In Europe we like to believe that politicians have brains and use them.) Apparently he thinks, and from a European perspective his views on redistribution, in particular, are interesting. Redistribution is something we Europeans have fought over for generations – how much should there be - more, or less? European conservatives definitely think there should be less. In the US, apparently, the concept itself is anathema. Only Democrats even consider it. Mr. Romney said the other day, "I know some believe that government should take from some to give to the others. I think the president [Mr. Obama] makes it clear in a tape that was released today that that’s what he believes. I think that’s an entirely foreign concept. ... The president is borrowing about a trillion more than we’re taking in every year. It’s a pathway that looks more European than American, in my view, and it’s one that I know some Americans are drawn to,” Romney said. “I think they’re wrong.” (LA Times, Sept 18, 2012). Notice the term “foreign” in “foreign concept”. Strange, weird, in other words.

Actually, according to the Republicans themselves, US public debt as of end 2011 outstrips the total debt level of the EU by a wide margin [http://plbirnamwood.blogspot.com.es/2012/04/us-debt-compared-to-europe.html]. So European borrowing habits cannot really be just the way Romney describes them.

Indeed, facts may not be all that relevant. Winning US presidential elections is mostly about shaping people's way of thinking about you as a candidate. Fortunately for the Republicans, many US voters evidently don't care about fact-checking. At the Republican National Convention that even was a point of boasting. Republicans don't check facts, they vote on ideology. To me this seems a bit of a let-down in a country that spent so much time and resources fighting communism.

Ultimately, convincing the electorate of one's leadership abilities is thought to be the way to win. Hence, types of leadership may be what many voters think of as essential. Personal leadership is highly regarded in the US, in politics as well as business. The same goes for Europe, but with an important difference of nuance. In a European perspective, politics is often seen as more complex, not simply a matter of individual effort. Of course, there are always exceptional people, and some of them end up as head of government or head of state. European parliamentary politics also focuses a lot on the leaders of parties, but they are not to the same extent considered – or expected to be – supreme, individual leaders.

That makes political credit and responsibility in Europe more diffuse, for better and worse. Not so in the United States. Credit is easily granted to politicians for successes they had no direct hand in, and blame is liberally dished out for failures most Europeans would never pin on his or her Prime Minister. In Europe, politics is more like the weather. In US politics, there is always someone to blame.

I may exaggerate, but I do think there is some kernel of truth in this. A probabilistic assessment ...