Heartless Moderates Will Hurt GOP in November

The New Deal began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, and for the past 80 years conservatives have been pounded by liberal Democrats (and liberal and moderate Republicans) for their alleged callousness toward the poor. Conservatives who questioned whether the welfare state was the right course for America -- or merely asked if it could be sustained -- were, as Ronald Reagan put it, denounced for being against liberal humanitarian goals.

Now it turns out that it is not the conservative candidates for the Republican nomination for President who are heartless and don’t care about the very poor. It is, in his own words, frontrunning Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor -- we have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it…” said Romney, and coupled with his comment that he likes to fire people (rather than saying he likes having options or likes having choices in health insurance), it communicates a lot about Romney’s noblesse oblige attitude toward non-millionaire Americans.

But Romney’s John Kerry-like noblesse oblige attitude is not our real concern about the former Massachusetts governor and his potential to be the Republican candidate for President.

Conservatives have always understood that the primary motivation of liberal spending is not to help the poor, but to bribe them with tax dollars to keep liberals in power. So, as easy as it is to pile on Romney for those two impolitic comments, our argument with Romney (and his moderate and liberal establishment Republican allies) is more about the rest of what he said in his “I’m not concerned about the very poor” interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien.

Romney went on to unhesitatingly adopt the language and attitude of Barack Obama and the Occupy Wall Street movement by saying, “…I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

And if 90 to 95 percent of Americans are “struggling,” then obviously the answer from Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is -- you guessed it -- more government.

If Romney and his establishment Republican allies really cared about the poor, then they would join Tea Partiers and grassroots conservatives in dismantling the ineffective welfare state that has kept the poor mired in poverty for most of the past 80 years. But be Democrats on the cheap is always the advice of establishment Republicans who see adopting the language and goals of liberal social engineering and welfare handouts, but not the taxes to fund them, as the way to election success.

This brand of big spending, big government establishment Republicanism is exactly what led to the rise of the Tea Party, and why small government constitutional conservatives are so deeply skeptical of the Romney candidacy.

Romney’s boneheaded comment that he’s “not concerned about the very poor” isn’t what hurt him the most in his interview with Soledad O’Brien. What hurt him the most was his acceptance of the language and ideas of the liberal welfare state that confirmed to Tea Partiers and movement conservatives that, if he is the nominee, we will see more Republican social engineering and welfare programs, such as the unfunded Medicare Part D program, the Massachusetts’ Romneycare health care mandate, and countless other large and small establishment Republican contributions to the erosion of our freedom and our rising ocean of debt.