For the first time in months, I feel inspired by the Republican standard bearer. For me, it wasn’t that against the President, Mitt Romney scored over and over again on style and substance. I’ll admit that getting a Gingrich-esque debate performance from Romney was a surprise because I had been frustrated with the Romney Campaign’s inability to get on offense and had started to question his toughness. Last night made me realize that maybe I’ve had it all wrong about Romney. The problem solver I listened to last night seemed genuinely frustrated at the President’s inability to address glaring issues inside the government. If Mitt Romney puts himself in front of the American people for the next five weeks and continues to elevate the debate by focusing his attention on things like the Dodd-Frank disaster, we can expect the overwhelming rejection of the Obama agenda.
Knowing that millions of people were watching the debate, Mitt Romney guided the debate to the problems that we can solve. It was so refreshing to see Romney destroy so many of the left’s straw men. Both Obamacare and Dodd-Frank are thousands of pages long, it is not shocking that there are a handful of good ideas buried amongst a whole bunch of bad ones. The left uses those tiny parts of huge legislation to demagogue any opposition. Mitt Romney clearly showed for the first time that he understands “too big to fail” and how the five mega-banks used Dodd-Frank to monopolize their status. It is a fact that smaller banks are going out of business because they cannot handle the new compliance measures in Dodd-Frank.
Governor Romney also spoke in depth about a guiding governing principle that people can relate to: local governance. Mitt Romney showed that he understands that the closer we can bring critical decisions to a community, the more effective those decisions will be. The media thinks that the Tea Party is a bunch of angry rednecks. But what they don’t realize is that this is the kind of sensible debate that we have been demanding.
The new Southpark episode last night was about raising the bar in our society, last night Mitt Romney raised the bar on political debate in this country.
