HUFFINGTON 08.26.12
grich advised waiting until after
the election, and then launching
“an online communication with
the American people in which he
walks them methodically through
the scale of the challenges and the
range of the choices.”
“The difference is, the morning
you wake up and say, ‘OK, I gotta
live with this guy for four years,’
he has all of the cultural power of
the presidency at that point,” Gingrich said. “And therefore he can
have conversations and achieve
things you can’t do before the
[election].”
“I mean from now until the
election he’s gotta win. It’s a very
narrow-focused problem,” Gingrich told me.
“I disagree with that totally,”
said Coburn, who has long been a
Gingrich antagonist. “Because if
that’s the calculus you make you
don’t get a mandate to fix it.”
“What needs to be heard in the
campaign rhetoric is, ‘Here’s the
real problem, let’s have the real
debates over the possible solutions. But let’s quit denying the
problems,’” Coburn said.
Choosing Ryan as a running mate
settled that argument. Romney
made it clear that he doesn’t see a
campaign centered around entitlement reform as political suicide.
At the same time, he’s also
opened himself up to Democratic
attacks and, assuredly, a flotilla
of attack ads.
THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION
by the Washington-based group
FreedomWorks in the fall of 2011
found tepid support for overhauling Medicare and Social Security.
As Romney pollster Neil Newhouse put it in a November 2011
briefing with reporters to discuss
the findings of focus groups with
women: “I can guarantee, the
word entitlements didn’t come
up in any of the focus groups we
did. You know what, I don’t think
the words Social Security and
Medicare came up. It really was
not an issue.”
So it was to my surprise that in
July, Romney’s top advisers were
split between those who thought
Romney should play it safe and
stick to a bland economy-andjobs message during the Republican National Convention and into
the fall, and those who thought
the presumptive Republican
nominee should go on offense on
the issue of entitlement reform
and Medicare.
This debate was also raging outside the Romney campaign, among
conservatives. Some said it was
unthinkable that Romney would
campaign on entitlement reform.
“It’s impossible,” Gingrich
told me when I asked him in late
July whether Romney should
talk about the Ryan plan. Gin-