The Anti-Entitlement Strategy - Thomas Edsall - - NYTimes.com

In a December 19 editorial in USA Today Mitt Romney delivered his counter to President Obama's progressive big thematic speech in Ossawotomie, Kansas.  Romney declared the choice is between an "Entitlement Society or an Opportunity society".  Obama framed the issue as whether we care for each other or pursue radical individualism.  So the opposing candidates (it's a given the Romney gets the GOP nod) agree on what they differ about.  Romney will run on the politics of resentment against Obama and the politics of hope (a job made much harder by the protracted difficulties and relentless opposition he has faced as President).  - GWC
The Anti-Entitlement Strategy - NYTimes.com:
by Thomas B. Edsall

(Journalism professor, Columbia University)

"Romney’s goal is to persuade swing voters of the imminent moral and material danger that Obama and the Democratic party pose. Here are three more lines from the Romney op-ed.

Over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an Entitlement Society.

If we continue on this course for another four years, we may pass the point of no return. We will have created a society that contains a sizable contingent of long-term jobless, dependent on government benefits for survival.

Government dependency can only foster passivity and sloth.

This is not the Republicanism of compassionate conservatism, far from it. In recent weeks, the former Massachusetts Governor has laid down a set of markers planting himself firmly on the right – just as Obama has begun to stake out a more leftward position. In outline, we are seeing the beginning of the general election campaign.

Romney’s adoption of an anti-entitlement strategy comes at a time when he appears to be looking up from the primaries toward Election Day, which suggests that his hard-line stance will be central to his campaign against Obama and not just a temporary maneuver. We are headed toward an ideological confrontation over the next 11 months of an intensity rarely seen in American political history."

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