Early in the general election campaign, Mitt Romney made it clear that he was not going to disclose the details of his plans before voters cast their ballots.  “One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” Mitt Romney told the Weekly Standard in an interview published April 2:  So I think it’s important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies. So for instance, I anticipate that housing vouchers will be turned over to the states rather than be administered at the federal level, and so at this point I think of the programs to be eliminated or to be returned to the states, and we’ll see what consolidation opportunities exist as a result of those program eliminations. So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.  This was a dangerous assertion. It amounted to waving a red flag in front of reporters.  With the presidential election just two weeks away, Romney’s gamble may be paying off. He has failed to specify where he would wield the budget knife, and he has defied, with a striking degree of success, the relatively quiet group of people who have called for him to honor a host of traditional disclosure and campaign practices.  It hasn’t mattered. The Obama v. Romney all-poll average is now tied on RealClearPolitics and down to a tiny 0.4 point advantage for Obama on the Huffington Post politics section’s Election Dashboard.  Romney’s evasions of traditional disclosure have been ongoing and almost insolent.  In July, when Romney refused to release more than two years of tax returns — in contrast to previous candidates of both parties, among them his father — there was a huge uproar. National Journal published a list of 17 prominent Republicans, including four sitting senators, who called on him to release 10 or more years. Editorials in papers across the country denounced Romney’s secrecy. The conservative columnist George Will declared that Romney “must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” Will warned Romney that he was losing the argument “in a big way.”  But it is Romney who appears to have won the argument. His tax returns are a dead issue, except on the left and liberal fringe.  Romney has repeatedly left unaddressed and unresolved a fundamental contradiction between his proposal to cut tax rates across the board by 20 percent and his claim that his fiscal policies will put the nation on a path toward a balanced budget. His proposal to pay for (technically, to keep “revenue neutral”) the rate cuts by capping deductions does not add up. The Third Way, a centrist Democratic organization, has calculated that limiting individuals to $17,000 dollars in deductions would only increase revenues by $1 trillion, less than a quarter of the $4.6 trillion cost of a 20 percent rate cut.  At the second presidential debate at Hofstra on Oct.16, Romney was asked about this arithmetical impossibility. He gave a murky 576-word answer. With some abbreviation, it went:  Now, how about deductions? ‘Cause I’m going to bring rates down across the board for everybody, but I’m going to limit deductions and exemptions and credits, particularly for people at the high end, because I am not going to have people at the high end pay less than they’re paying.  The top 5 percent of taxpayers will continue to pay 60 percent of the income tax the nation collects. So that’ll stay the same. Middle-income people are going to get a tax break. And so, in terms of bringing down deductions, one way of doing that would be say everybody gets — I’ll pick a number — $25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use. Your home mortgage interest deduction, charity, child tax credit, and so forth, you can use those as part of filling that bucket, if you will, of deductions.  Romney concluded with the following declaration: “I want to get us on track to a balanced budget, and I’m going to reduce the tax burden on middle income families.” In the face of reason, he simply asserts that there is no conflict between the achievement of two welcome goals: a balanced budget and reduced tax burdens.  Romney runs into a parallel dilemma on the spending side of his proposals. He has called for a $2 trillion increase in military expenditures – which would then rise to 4 percent of Gross Domestic Product — while putting a cap on total federal spending of 20 percent of G.D.P. The highly reputable, if liberal, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, contends that doing the math on Romney’s budget outline produces some jarring consequences that the candidate does not address:  By 2022, the cuts under Governor Romney’s budget proposals would shrink nondefense discretionary spending — which, over the past 50 years, has averaged 3.9 percent of G.D.P. and never fallen below 3.2 percent — to 1.8 percent of G.D.P. if Medicare shares in the cuts, and to 1.3 percent of G.D.P. if it does not. These cuts would be noticeably deeper than those required under the austere House-passed budget plan authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). (Romney’s nondefense cuts are deeper because his proposal increases core defense spending — the defense budget other than war costs and some relatively small items such as military family housing — to 4 percent of G.D.P., while the Ryan budget does not.) Over the coming decade, Romney would require cuts in programs other than core defense of $6.1 trillion, compared with $5.0 trillion in cuts under the House-passed budget plan.  Even accepting the tough cuts Ryan has called for in programs serving the poor and the out-of-work – Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment benefits – Romney will have to cut programs popular with the middle class, many of them swing voters and independents. But, as Romney noted in his Weekly Standard interview, he is “not going to give” us “a list right now.”  Instead, Romney is going in the opposite direction.  When Democrats began suggesting that veterans’ benefits might have to be cut, Romney immediately declared that veterans’ programs were off limits. “Governor Romney and Paul Ryan are committed to keeping faith with our veterans and providing the care they so richly deserve,” Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, wrote to me in an email.  In the Denver presidential debate on Oct. 3, Romney also gave a get-out-of-jail-free card to education spending:  I’m not going to cut education funding. I don’t have any plan to cut education funding and grants that go to people going to college. I’m planning on continuing to grow, so I’m not planning on making changes there.  If Romney wins and actually tries to reduce deficits to the levels he has described during the campaign, he would have to make drastic cuts in widely backed discretionary spending programs. These programs would not just suffer cuts. Homeland security, the administration of justice, environmental protection, the National Institutes of Health: They would all face the prospect of being gouged or slaughtered.  It is not surprising that Romney does not want to get specific.  The fourth area of evasiveness has been in campaign finance. Unlike previous Republican presidential contenders — Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, for example — Romney will not voluntarily identify the men and women who raise large amounts of money for him. Because these “bundlers,” as they’re known, are raising rather than donating money, Romney is not required to disclose who they are.  These un-disclosed bundlers perform an essential service: C.E.O.s or major real estate developers or other business leaders with large numbers of managerial employees can raise anywhere from $100,000 to well over $1 million in separate, individual amounts of $2,500. In other words, for a bundler to raise $1 million, he or she must gather maximum $2,500 contributions from 400 people, which is no small task.  The most successful bundlers have enhanced access to the campaign, often dealing directly with the candidate, and, after the election, with cabinet and White House officials. They are in a position to seek advantageous treatment.  Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 voluntarily disclosed his entire network of fundraisers, and George W. Bush publicly listed his bundlers, categorizing those who raised a minimum of $100,000 as “Pioneers”, and those who raised at least $200,000 as “Rangers.” With almost no fanfare, Romney has declined to name his bundlers, except the registered lobbyist-fundraisers who by law must be disclosed.  A Romney victory will make it possible for future candidates to take the same path of secretiveness. Non-disclosure could become the norm.  Perhaps just as interesting, Romney has demonstrated that the press is relatively toothless — that a candidate who is willing to take the heat for a while can outlast the media. During the Republican convention in Tampa, Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster, famously said, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” In private, some of Newhouse’s Republican colleagues said that they thought he was making a mistake by throwing down the gauntlet to a group of reporters like that. In practice, his challenge was never taken up.  No matter what happens on Nov. 6, this position of massive resistance is likely to become integral to campaign strategy in the future. There is an ongoing debate over the effectiveness of fact-checking by newspapers and independent organizations. But looked at from a strategic point of view, Newhouse’s position appears to have worked.  With the candidates running neck-and-neck 2 weeks before Election Day, Romney has no choice but to walk a tightrope on either side of which lie his irreconcilable claims. His own party has moved so far to the right that the path to the nomination forces Republican candidates to adopt positions that cannot be sold in the general election. To accommodate both the conservative wing of his party and the demands of mainstream voters has required Romney to dodge tough questions. In many ways he has gotten away with it.  The truth is that a candidate who campaigns on the promise that he will turn the economy around cannot be forthright. America is approaching the so-called fiscal cliff. In January, the terms of the Budget Control Act of 2011 are scheduled to go into effect — the end of both the Bush tax cuts and payroll tax cuts and the slashing of $100 billion in defense and domestic spending known as sequestration. Whoever wins the election will jettison his campaign promises. Political cynicism will almost certainly deepen.  But even judged by the standards of past dichotomies between election pledges and the realities of governing, Romney has placed himself in an exceptionally untenable position. This season’s rhetoric has exposed the spuriousness of the inflated promises of the Republican nominee. The approaching emergency is real. Those who hope for Romney’s victory should pay attention to what he hasn’t said as much as to what he has.  Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.
The Republican nominee has gotten away with a new secretiveness on his fundraising, his tax returns and his budget proposals - without paying much of a political price.