Mario Cuomo is generally credited with this little peanut of political perspective.
"you campaign in poetry...but you govern in prose..."
Simply put, the process of being elected to office requires the sharing of lofty ambitions with those whose votes are being courted, inspirational visions of ideally endless possiblity, flowing phrases and oratory whose sole purpose is to simultaneously lift spirits and hopes, affirming allusions to those things Bobby Kennedy referred to when he quoted George Bernard Shaw "some men see things as they are and say why...I dream things that never were...and say why not?"
The process of actually being in office, though, requires an entirely different skill set.
Think of the campaign as the candidate's best efforts to put you in mind of a beautiful garden in the full bloom of all the wonder that life, and nature, have to offer.
And the actual day to day reality of governing as the shoveling of the fertilizer essential to any chance that any growth at all will occur.
Case, or garden as the case may be, in point.
The Romney economic plan.
Here's some summary points from the candidate's very own website.
1.The Federal Government Should Stop Doing Things The American People Can’t Afford, For Instance:
•Repeal Obamacare — Savings: $95 Billion. President Obama’s costly takeover of the health care system imposes an enormous and unaffordable obligation on the federal government while intervening in a matter that should be left to the states. Mitt will begin his efforts to repeal this legislation on Day One.
•Privatize Amtrak — Savings: $1.6 Billion. Despite requirement that Amtrak operate on a for-profit basis, it continues to receive about $1.6 billion in taxpayer funds each year. Forty-one of Amtrak’s 44 routes lost money in 2008 with losses ranging from $5 to $462 per passenger.
•Reduce Subsidies For The National Endowments For The Arts And Humanities, The Corporation For Public Broadcasting, And The Legal Services Corporation — Savings: $600 Million. NEA, NEH, and CPB provide grants to supplement other sources of funding. LSC funds services mostly duplicative of those already offered by states, localities, bar associations and private organizations.
•Eliminate Title X Family Planning Funding — Savings: $300 Million. Title X subsidizes family planning programs that benefit abortion groups like Planned Parenthood.
•Reduce Foreign Aid — Savings: $100 Million. Stop borrowing money from countries that oppose America’s interests in order to give it back to them in the form of foreign aid.
If pursued with focus and discipline, Mitt’s approach provides a roadmap to rescue the federal government from its present precipice. But that respite will be short-lived without a plan for the looming long-term threat posed by the unsustainable nature of existing entitlement obligations. Learn more about Mitt’s proposals for entitlement reform: [links to Medicare and Social Security]
2.Empower States To Innovate — Savings: >$100 billion
•Block grants have huge potential to generate both superior results and cost savings by establishing local control and promoting innovation in areas such as Medicaid and Worker Retraining. Medicaid spending should be capped and increased each year by CPI + 1%. Department of Labor retraining spending should be capped and will increase in future years. These funds should then be given to the states to spend on their own residents. States will be free from Washington micromanagement, allowing them to develop innovative approaches that improve quality and reduce cost.
3.Improve Efficiency And Effectiveness. Where the federal government should act, it must do a better job. For instance:
•Reduce Waste And Fraud — Savings: $60 Billion. The federal government made $125 billion in improper payments last year. Cutting that amount in half through stricter enforcement and harsher penalties yields returns many times over on the investment.
•Align Federal Employee Compensation With The Private Sector — Savings: $47 Billion. Federal compensation exceeds private sector levels by as much as 30 to 40 percent when benefits are taken into account. This must be corrected.
•Repeal The Davis-Bacon Act — Savings: $11 Billion. Davis-Bacon forces the government to pay above-market wages, insulating labor unions from competition and driving up project costs by approximately 10 percent.
•Reduce The Federal Workforce By 10 Percent Via Attrition — Savings: $4 Billion. Despite widespread layoffs in the private sector, President Obama has continued to grow the federal payrolls. The federal workforce can be reduced by 10 percent through a “1-for-2” system of attrition, thereby reducing the number of federal employees while allowing the introduction of new talent into the federal service.
•Consolidate agencies and streamline processes to cut costs and improve results in everything from energy permitting to worker retraining to trade negotiation.
Now, an overview of what all of that might mean, courtesy of Andrew Taylor of the Associated Press...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Reducing government deficits Mitt Romney's way would mean less money for health care for the poor and disabled and big cuts to nuts-and-bolts functions such as food inspection, border security and education.
Romney also promises budget increases for the Pentagon, above those sought by some GOP defense hawks, meaning that the rest of the government would have to shrink even more. Nonmilitary programs would incur still larger cuts than those called for in the tightfisted GOP budget that the House passed last month.
Differences over the government's budget and spiraling deficits are among the starkest that separate Republican Romney and Democratic President Barack Obama. Obama's budget generally avoids risk, with minimal cuts to rapidly growing health care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid while socking wealthier people with tax increases. It's all part of an effort to close trillion-dollar-plus deficits.
Romney, by contrast, proposes broad cuts in government spending, possibly overpromising on reductions that even a Congress stuffed with conservatives might find hard to deliver.
His campaign materials give relatively few specifics, other than a pledge to bring total government spending down to 20 percent of the U.S. economy by the end of a first term in 2016. That is roughly in line with where it was during Republican George W. Bush's presidency.
Estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office put current government spending at $3.6 trillion, or about 23.5 percent of the gross domestic product this year, slipping to 21.8 percent by 2016.
The math can get fuzzy. But the Romney campaign says it needs to come up with $500 billion in cuts in 2016, the target year. Overall, Romney promises to shrink the government by about one-seventh when compared against the size of the economy.
The GOP front-runner suggests raising the Social Security retirement age and reducing cost-of-living increases for better-off retirees.
He generally endorses a plan by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to gradually transform Medicare from a program that directly pays hospital and doctor bills into vouchers for subsidizing future beneficiaries in buying health insurance.
Because Romney promises to protect current Social Security and Medicare recipients from cuts, he cannot get much savings from those programs by 2016. Combined, they are projected to make up about 44 percent of the budget that year. Interest costs, which cannot be touched, would make up an additional 9 percent of the budget, while Romney promises to add almost $100 billion to the Pentagon budget that year, based on his pledge that military spending reach 4 percent of GDP.
So what's left to cut?
—MEDICAID: The program now provides health care for about 50 million mostly poor and disabled people, including nursing home care for 7 of 10 patients nationwide. Obama's health care law sharply would sharply boost Medicaid enrollment to cover more people above the poverty line, a move that Romney promises to repeal.
Like House Republicans, Romney promises to transform Medicaid into block grants for states and shed federal supervision of it. He would cap the program's annual growth to inflation plus a percentage point. His campaign says the approach would unshackle states to innovate and, by the end of a decade, cut costs by more than $200 billion a year.
Advocates for the poor say the inevitable result will be that millions of people will be bounced from the program. An Urban Institute study last year estimated that Ryan's cuts would force between 14 million and 27 million people off of Medicaid by 2021. Romney's budget would make deeper cuts.
—DOMESTIC AGENCY BUDGETS: If Social Security is mostly off the table and current Medicare beneficiaries are protected, domestic Cabinet agency budgets would take a major hit in ways that could fundamentally alter government. The future growth of those discretionary programs funded through annual appropriations bills was already cut greatly in last year's deal to raise the government's borrowing limit.
At issue are these programs, just to name a few: health research; NASA; transportation; homeland security; education; food inspection; housing and heating subsidies for the poor; food aid for pregnant women; the FBI; grants to local governments; national parks; and veterans' health care.
Romney promises to immediately cut them by 5 percent. But they would have to be cut more than 20 percent to meet his overall budget goals, assuming veterans' health care is exempted. It's almost unthinkable that lawmakers would go along with cuts of such magnitude for air traffic control and food inspection or to agencies like NASA, the FBI, Border Patrol and the Centers for Disease Control.
"It's just not sustainable," said GOP lobbyist Jim Dyer, a former staff director for the House Appropriations Committee. "What do you want to do with the national parks? Which ones do you want to close? ...The only way it adds up is if you go after the big, popular stuff, and nobody talks about that now."
Among the few specific cuts listed in Romney's campaign literature are proposals to cut the federal workforce by 10 percent through attrition, eliminate federal family planning money, privatize the money-losing Amtrak system and trim foreign aid.
—OTHER BENEFIT PROGRAMS: Like Ryan's budget, the Romney plan would also cut benefit programs other than Social Security and Medicare. They include food stamps, school lunches, crop subsidies, Supplemental Security Income for very poor seniors and disabled people, unemployment insurance, veterans' pensions and refundable tax credits to the working poor.
Based on the Romney materials, it's impossible to project the size of the cuts to such programs. Suffice it to say, they would be controversial.
"There's good reason why Ryan's budget and the Romney budget don't have details," said Jim Horney, a budget analyst with the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy priorities think tank. "If people knew what it would actually have to be done to accomplish what they're saying should be done, it's hard to imagine there would be widespread support for it."
No reasonable person, regardless of party stripe, would argue that common sense and good judgement need to be the first, critical criteria when it comes to how much of our money the government should spend and/or how they should spend it.
The problem, of course, is that common sense is not now, nor has it ever particularly been, either common or sensical.
And good judgement?
Well, there's a phrase that can easily knock "jumbo shrimp", "military intelligence" and/or "classic hip-hop" right out of the number one slot on the oxymoronic hit parade.
One man's "outrageously overpriced boondoggle" is another's "sound investment opportunity".
What is important in all of this, and what tends to get lost in the white noise generated by other more hot button issues like morality, religion, et al in a campaign at the Presidential level, is the day to day, real life results of the fix lurking in the midst of the philosophy.
Putting aside party passions in just one example...
Obama's plan would apparently make Medicare/Medicaid available to more people who would otherwise not be able to afford any health care.
Romney's plan would apparently reduce that availability.
The details, nuances and intracacies of a single issue, like health care, alone are enough to keep an entire city population's respective heads spinning for hours on end.
Here's politics in plain english...
One plan will keep your elderly aunt or uncle covered.
One will not.
If that seems like an endorsement of Obama and a repudiation of Romney, it is not intended to be.
It is, simply, an illustration of how important it is to listen to everything that candidates bring to our doors, along with the candy and flowers of courtship.
Because the phrase "we need to stop spending more money that we take in", while lacking a certain rhythm and/or rhyme, still has a poetic, lyrical sensibility about it.
A beloved family member without health care is the kind of prose all too often, and much too regrettably, found lurking in the lyric.
