Last Sunday, I wrapped up my series of posts on Mitt Romney's positions in the debates. Now it's time to look at Gary Johnson, who initially ran as a Republican but has now secured the nomination for the Libertarian Party. Since Johnson was only in two debates, the first and the sixth, there's simply not as much material as there was for Romney, who was in 19 debates. While Romney got five entries, Johnson only gets this one.
National Security
In the first debate, he said he would withdraw from Afghanistan "tomorrow," was against the war in Iraq from the beginning, and was also opposed to intervention in Libya (Syria was not yet an issue at the time). He is solidly against war, saying in the 6th debate, "The biggest threat to our national security is the fact that we're
bankrupt." As part of his promise to balance the budget, he supports a 43% cut to military spending.
Immigration and Trade
He said in the first debate that there was "very little, if any benefit" to securing the border, and that freer immigration would create "tens of millions of jobs." On trade, he said, "I'm a free market guy... I don't favor tariffs of any
kind, whatsoever." In the two debates, he was only able to address trade with one country, Cuba, which he supports, because he believes that trade encourages friendship.
Taxes and Spending
He supports the Fair Tax, a national sales tax that would replace the corporate and personal income taxes. On spending, he would balance the budget in his first year in office. Since he says current spending outpaces revenue by 43%, that's how much he wants to cut from all federal spending, including 43% each from the military, Medicare and Medicaid. To get it done, he would turn Medicare and Medicaid into block grants, veto any bill where expenditures exceeded revenue, completely eliminate the Department of Education and subject federal programs to cost-benefit analyses, then get rid of the ones that don't measure up.
The Economy
To get the economy growing again, he would restructure the tax code and greatly reduce federal spending as described above. He also sees freer immigration as a way to encourage "tens of millions" of new jobs. He would eliminate the federal minimum wage, and stop extending unemployment benefits.
Social Issues
He declined to describe himself as "pro-life," and said in the first debate that he supports abortion "up until viability." (While viability lacks a precise definition, that would allow abortions at least into the fifth month of pregnancy, and possibly later.) However, he opposes public funds for abortion, and favors parental notification and counseling. On drugs, he admits to having smoked marijuana, and supports legalization along with regulation and taxation of marijuana. While gay marriage didn't come up in the debates, on Twitter he often sells himself as the only candidate supporting "marriage equality" (at least, prior to Obama's recent conversion).
Ron Paul
When directly asked in the sixth debate what made him a better choice for libertarian Republicans than Ron Paul, Johnson said, "I'm not going to presume to make that
assumption." When asked who his running mate would be if it had to be someone at the sixth debate, he said Ron Paul. On Twitter, many of his public tweets are also directed towards Ron Paul. While I haven't seen anything explicitly laying this out, I suspect he looks at Paul's age and wants to be the next Ron Paul once Paul himself leaves public life. It will be very interesting to see how much support Johnson gets from Paulites once Paul eventually quits the race.
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Monday, May 21, 2012
Friday, May 4, 2012
Mitt Romney on Foreign Policy
Now that Newt Gingrich has officially dropped out of the race, only
Mitt Romney and Ron Paul remain. Paul up to this point has only gotten
about 80-90 delegates depending on who's counting, while Romney has some
840. For all that I dislike Mitt Romney, the Republican nomination is
now pretty much settled.
Now that we're entering the general election phase of the campaign, with Romney as the Republican standard-bearer, I think it would be useful to revisit the positions he took during the primary debates. My vote, at this point, is far from certain, and just as I used this blog to decide my vote in the primary, I will also be using it to decide my vote in the general election. While it's possible some or all of Romney's positions in the primary will be Etch-a-Sketched away soon, I think this is a good enough place to start.
My original coverage of the debates can be found under the debate tag and the 2012 primaries tag. Romney attended most of the debates, with the exception of the first, the Thanksgiving Family Forum and of course the one-on-one Gingrich debates with Cain and Huntsman. All my coverage of Mitt Romney himself, which is mostly just the debates so far, can be found under the Mitt Romney tag.
Over the 19 debates, Romney took lots of positions on lots of different issues, so I'm splitting this up into multiple entries. This one covers foreign policy, including immigration, trade, defense and policies toward some specific countries and regions.
Immigration
In the 3rd debate, he said, "We are a nation of immigrants. We love legal immigration." In the 8th debate, he said, "I think every single person here loves legal immigration." But only twice in 19 debates did he talk about encouraging legal immigration, once in the 3rd debate and later in the 11th, both in the context of high-skilled immigrants. For the most part, when Romney talks about immigration, he talks about discouraging illegal immigration. Unfortunately, discouraging illegal immigration by making legal immigration easier doesn't seem to have occurred to him. He focuses entirely on securing the border with a fence and lots of federal agents, and making it harder to hire illegal immigrants.
As for illegal immigrants who are already here, he says in the 19th debate, "Our problem is 11 million people getting jobs that many Americans, legal immigrants, would like to have." In early debates he held that any kind of path to legality, never mind citizenship, amounts to amnesty; later, in the 18th debate, he supported allowing illegal immigrant children to gain citizenship through military service. He would encourage self-deportation by requiring immigrants to present legal-status cards to be hired (and, since the absence of such a card would imply you're an illegal immigrant, the requirement for such a card would also necessarily extend to citizens). He mentions this card multiple times, in the 13th, 17th, 18th and 19th debates.
Trade
Mitt's trade policy leaves a lot to be desired. In the 3rd debate, he called our trade partners our "opponents," and I wasn't the only one to notice. In the 5th and later debates, he substituted "the other guys" for "opponents," but the sentiment still clearly remained. His primary trade policy is to "crack down on cheaters like China," which he mentioned, often with those exact words, in the 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th, 14th, 16th, 17th and 19th debates.
He did talk about expanding trade, but far less often than cracking down on China, and always in the context of "open[ing] up markets for our goods," as he said in the 14th debate. He seems to hold a typical mercantilist philosophy, where exports are good but imports are bad. Anything China or other countries do to encourage American imports should be punished, and the only goal of free trade agreements is to encourage American exports.
Defense
He opposes all cuts to defense spending, preferring cuts to entitlements and Obamacare. In fact, he wants to increase military spending, in particular by building more ships for the Navy (which he mentioned in the 13th, 18th and 20th debates) and recruiting an extra 100,000 troops (which he mentioned only once, in the 13th debate).
Specific Countries/Regions
China: Most of Romney's policy towards China focuses on trade, particularly "cracking down" on them for cheating. He promised in the 7th debate to issue an executive order on "day one" labelling China a currency manipulator, and to initiate action against China at the WTO.
Afghanistan: His Afghanistan policy is most charitably described as continually evolving. In the 2nd and 3rd debates, he preferred a timetable for withdrawal established by the generals in Afghanistan. In the 10th, he was fine with Obama's 2014 timetable for the general withdrawal, but not the September 2012 withdrawal of the surge troops. In the 11th, he said he wanted to keep the surge troops in Afghanistan until December 2012, and keep "ten thousand or so" troops in Afghanistan after 2014. In the 14th debate, he said he didn't yet have enough information to say when he would withdraw the troops from Afghanistan.
Iran: He is absolutely opposed to Iran getting nuclear weapons, going so far as to say in the 20th debate that re-electing Obama would lead to Iranian nukes being used against Americans, and that a Romney Presidency was the only way to prevent that. He said he would "of course" go to war "if all else fails" (in the 10th debate) and that Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz would "of course" be an act of war (in the 18th debate). He also wanted "crippling sanctions" against Iran in the 10th and 11th debates, and in the 14th criticized Obama for not supporting the Iranian protestors in 2009.
Iraq: Before going back into Iraq, he would want to "require significant, dramatic American interests" to be at stake, and said he would outline a specific endgame in terms of what would qualify as success.
Syria: In the 10th debate, he said, "Of course, it's time for the Assad dictatorship to end," but in the 11th said, "This is not the time for a no-fly zone over Syria."
Israel and Palestine: In the 19th debate, responding to a question from a self-identified Palestinian-American Republican, Romney said, "The best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say, we stand with our friend Israel. We are committed to a Jewish state in Israel. We will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel."
Europe: In the 7th, 9th and 16th debates, he opposed a direct bailout to Europe, saying they are big enough to solve their own problems. He would, however, be willing to provide assistance through the IMF and World Bank, and hinted he would bail out American companies affected by Europe's problems.
Canada: In 19 debates, Romney mentioned our largest trading partner and the country with which we share the world's largest land border once, and even that was indirectly through his support for the Keystone XL pipeline in the 17th debate.
Now that we're entering the general election phase of the campaign, with Romney as the Republican standard-bearer, I think it would be useful to revisit the positions he took during the primary debates. My vote, at this point, is far from certain, and just as I used this blog to decide my vote in the primary, I will also be using it to decide my vote in the general election. While it's possible some or all of Romney's positions in the primary will be Etch-a-Sketched away soon, I think this is a good enough place to start.
My original coverage of the debates can be found under the debate tag and the 2012 primaries tag. Romney attended most of the debates, with the exception of the first, the Thanksgiving Family Forum and of course the one-on-one Gingrich debates with Cain and Huntsman. All my coverage of Mitt Romney himself, which is mostly just the debates so far, can be found under the Mitt Romney tag.
Over the 19 debates, Romney took lots of positions on lots of different issues, so I'm splitting this up into multiple entries. This one covers foreign policy, including immigration, trade, defense and policies toward some specific countries and regions.
Immigration
In the 3rd debate, he said, "We are a nation of immigrants. We love legal immigration." In the 8th debate, he said, "I think every single person here loves legal immigration." But only twice in 19 debates did he talk about encouraging legal immigration, once in the 3rd debate and later in the 11th, both in the context of high-skilled immigrants. For the most part, when Romney talks about immigration, he talks about discouraging illegal immigration. Unfortunately, discouraging illegal immigration by making legal immigration easier doesn't seem to have occurred to him. He focuses entirely on securing the border with a fence and lots of federal agents, and making it harder to hire illegal immigrants.
As for illegal immigrants who are already here, he says in the 19th debate, "Our problem is 11 million people getting jobs that many Americans, legal immigrants, would like to have." In early debates he held that any kind of path to legality, never mind citizenship, amounts to amnesty; later, in the 18th debate, he supported allowing illegal immigrant children to gain citizenship through military service. He would encourage self-deportation by requiring immigrants to present legal-status cards to be hired (and, since the absence of such a card would imply you're an illegal immigrant, the requirement for such a card would also necessarily extend to citizens). He mentions this card multiple times, in the 13th, 17th, 18th and 19th debates.
Trade
Mitt's trade policy leaves a lot to be desired. In the 3rd debate, he called our trade partners our "opponents," and I wasn't the only one to notice. In the 5th and later debates, he substituted "the other guys" for "opponents," but the sentiment still clearly remained. His primary trade policy is to "crack down on cheaters like China," which he mentioned, often with those exact words, in the 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th, 14th, 16th, 17th and 19th debates.
He did talk about expanding trade, but far less often than cracking down on China, and always in the context of "open[ing] up markets for our goods," as he said in the 14th debate. He seems to hold a typical mercantilist philosophy, where exports are good but imports are bad. Anything China or other countries do to encourage American imports should be punished, and the only goal of free trade agreements is to encourage American exports.
Defense
He opposes all cuts to defense spending, preferring cuts to entitlements and Obamacare. In fact, he wants to increase military spending, in particular by building more ships for the Navy (which he mentioned in the 13th, 18th and 20th debates) and recruiting an extra 100,000 troops (which he mentioned only once, in the 13th debate).
Specific Countries/Regions
China: Most of Romney's policy towards China focuses on trade, particularly "cracking down" on them for cheating. He promised in the 7th debate to issue an executive order on "day one" labelling China a currency manipulator, and to initiate action against China at the WTO.
Afghanistan: His Afghanistan policy is most charitably described as continually evolving. In the 2nd and 3rd debates, he preferred a timetable for withdrawal established by the generals in Afghanistan. In the 10th, he was fine with Obama's 2014 timetable for the general withdrawal, but not the September 2012 withdrawal of the surge troops. In the 11th, he said he wanted to keep the surge troops in Afghanistan until December 2012, and keep "ten thousand or so" troops in Afghanistan after 2014. In the 14th debate, he said he didn't yet have enough information to say when he would withdraw the troops from Afghanistan.
Iran: He is absolutely opposed to Iran getting nuclear weapons, going so far as to say in the 20th debate that re-electing Obama would lead to Iranian nukes being used against Americans, and that a Romney Presidency was the only way to prevent that. He said he would "of course" go to war "if all else fails" (in the 10th debate) and that Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz would "of course" be an act of war (in the 18th debate). He also wanted "crippling sanctions" against Iran in the 10th and 11th debates, and in the 14th criticized Obama for not supporting the Iranian protestors in 2009.
Iraq: Before going back into Iraq, he would want to "require significant, dramatic American interests" to be at stake, and said he would outline a specific endgame in terms of what would qualify as success.
Syria: In the 10th debate, he said, "Of course, it's time for the Assad dictatorship to end," but in the 11th said, "This is not the time for a no-fly zone over Syria."
Israel and Palestine: In the 19th debate, responding to a question from a self-identified Palestinian-American Republican, Romney said, "The best way to have peace in the Middle East is not for us to vacillate and to appease, but is to say, we stand with our friend Israel. We are committed to a Jewish state in Israel. We will not have an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally, Israel."
Europe: In the 7th, 9th and 16th debates, he opposed a direct bailout to Europe, saying they are big enough to solve their own problems. He would, however, be willing to provide assistance through the IMF and World Bank, and hinted he would bail out American companies affected by Europe's problems.
Canada: In 19 debates, Romney mentioned our largest trading partner and the country with which we share the world's largest land border once, and even that was indirectly through his support for the Keystone XL pipeline in the 17th debate.
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