Romney is testing just how far he can go in not telling voters what policies he’d pursue. Mitt Romney's no-policy problem

Mitt Romney’s aides suggested that when the Republican appeared before a Hispanic advocacy group on Thursday he’d address immigration.

But when Romney spoke to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), he only reiterated what he had said earlier in the week about the citizenship status of children of illegal immigrants.


“I will put in place my own long-term solution that will replace and supersede the president’s temporary measure,” he told the group about President Barack Obama’s hotly debated directive regarding the DREAM Act.

But on the question of what exactly such a long-term solution would be, the GOP nominee isn’t saying.

Vague, general or downright evasive policy prescriptions on some of the most important issues facing the country are becoming the rule for Romney. Hoping to make the campaign strictly a referendum on the incumbent, the hyper-cautious challenger is open about his determination to not give any fodder to Obama aides hungry to make the race as much about Romney as the president.

Romney is remarkably candid, almost as though he’s reading the stage directions, about why he won’t offer up details: he thinks it will undermine his chances to win.

“The media kept saying to Chris, ‘Come on, give us the details, give us the details,’’’ Romney has said about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s 2009 gubernatorial race. ‘’We want to hang you with them.’”

It’s a lesson the former Massachusetts governor said he took from his first, painful foray into electoral politics in 1994.

“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,” Romney told the Weekly Standard this spring.

That’s not to say Romney doesn’t have plans: he suggested at an April fundraiser overheard by reporters that the departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development might be eliminated or merged with other agencies, and even said he’d pay for proposed tax cuts by eliminating the second home mortgage deduction.

But as he enters the heat of this year’s campaign, Romney is testing just how far he can go in not telling voters what policies he’d pursue in the White House.

He’s not entirely alone in sticking to a do-no-harm strategy when it comes to policy proposals. Obama has offered scant detail about how he’d balance the budget in a second term, let alone what his top priorities would be for the next four years. The Romney campaign contends that Obama should be held to a high standard as the incumbent.

“President Obama has had three and a half years to get this economy moving and put us on a path to a balanced budget, tackle long-term immigration reform and strengthen our military. But all we have seen is broken promises and a lack of leadership with no plans to make things better in the future,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said.

“On the other hand, Mitt Romney has provided an unprecedented level of detail during the course of the campaign and will continue to discuss his plans to get the economy back on track between now and the election.”

But Republicans not affiliated with Romney’s campaign aren’t so sure about that level of detail, and worry that Romney thinks running out the clock is sufficient to win.

“The Romney strategy the past eight weeks has been, in a small way, shrewd: have the candidate out there talking in a candidate-like manner, but don’t let him say anything so interesting that it will take the cameras off Mr. Obama,” wrote conservative columnist Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. “The president is lurching from gaffe to mess, from bad news to worse. Don’t get in his way as he harms himself. It’s working, but won’t for long. People want meaning, a higher and declared purpose.”

For Democrats, Romney’s refusal is a both a source of frustration and a target to shoot at. It’s hard to make the contest a “choice” campaign when the challenger is so determined to minimize his own issue profile in the race.

Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo urged Obama to challenge Romney aggressively to “give me your plan” for the country. Right now, Cuomo said, Romney’s “playing the Nixon game. Nixon said, ‘I have a plan but you won’t know it until you elect me as president.’ ”

“His whole case is, ‘Trust me, I made myself rich,’ ” Cuomo said of Romney. “We should know what our choices really are. You know what our choice is with Obama. He hasn’t hidden anything. He’s not suggesting that he’s holding back anything. So you know Obama, but you do not know Romney. And that’s done deliberately and it’s not fair.”

On multiple major issue areas, Romney has left holes in the public record about what he’d do as president:

Immigration

Obama’s directive offering legal status to some children of illegal immigrants prompted the most recent, and perhaps most egregious, example of Romney’s hiding the ball.

Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” four times if he’d overturn Obama’s order, the Republican wouldn’t say yes or no. Romney only insisted he’d offer a “long-term solution.” He then deployed the same generic phrase later in the week to NALEO.

But it’s not just on the children of illegal immigrants that Romney has been purposefully vague – he’s also not laid out a plan for what he’d do about the entirety of the 11 million individuals in the country illegally. Worried that coming out for some sort of path to citizenship will anger border hawks on the right but conscious of the need for Hispanic votes to win, Romney has stuck to generalities during the general election after hard-line rhetoric in the primary season.

“I will address the problem of illegal immigration in a civil but resolute manner,” he told NALEO, indicating how he’d go about addressing the issue but not what he’d actually do about it.

The policies Romney has laid out on immigration tend to focus on more educated, higher-skilled immigrants, proposing to increase visa caps and give green cards to foreigners who obtain advanced degrees in the U.S. Romney has spoken of an electronic system for verifying workers’ legal status, which would make it harder for businesses’ to hire undocumented workers’ — and perhaps, over time drive those workers out of the country. He’d also give permanent resident status to illegal immigrants who served in the military.

Romney does seem to have bigger ideas on the matter, but he just seems reluctant to lay it out. As long ago as last December, he told the conservative Washington Examiner: “I actually have a plan in mind, I haven’t unveiled it.”

“This issue is now part of the election debate and not going away,” said Ana Navarro, the former national Hispanic campaign chair for John McCain. “I don’t know whether or not he’ll give specific answers on DREAM [Act] and a plan for undocumented [immigrants], but I do know the questions will persist.”

Balancing the budget

It’s on the matter of how he’d get the country’s fiscal house in order that Romney has been so candid about why he won’t be specific. In the Weekly Standard interview this spring, he said he’d eliminate entire agencies – but then declined to say which ones.

“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,” he told reporter Stephen Hayes. But, noting what the Kennedy race taught him, Romney added: “I’m not going to give you a list right now.”

Last summer, Romney waited until virtually the last possible moment to weigh in on the standoff over the debt ceiling – and then sided against congressional GOP leaders who cut an 11th hour deal with the White House. When the Republican laid out his tax reform plan earlier this year in Detroit he proposed lowering all income tax rates by 20 percent and indicated he’d pay for such reduced revenue by eliminating deductions – without naming which ones he’d eliminate. Romney has even admitted that his plan can’t be fully evaluated because he hasn’t named the offsets.

The cuts he has identified have tended to come with price tags closer to the million than to the trillion dollar mark. Romney supports privatizing Amtrak, cutting foreign aid, reducing funding for programs like the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He argues that eliminating Obama’s health-care bill would save billions, but independent budget analysts aren’t so sure.

If the candidate has been mum publicly about the bigger-ticket programs he’d cut and what loopholes he’d do away with, he has revealed some of his intentions in private.

If not the Rosetta Stone to his presidential intentions, Romney’s remarks at a Florida fundraiser in April made clear that he’s just not saying publicly what his ideas are about how exactly he’d balance the budget.

“Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later,” Romney told the donors.

And the Education Department? “I will either consolidate with another agency, or perhaps make it a heck of a lot smaller. I’m not going to get rid of it entirely.”

That wasn’t all he revealed, though, when it came to his governing intentions: there was also a riff on how’d he pay for his tax cut.

“I’m going to probably eliminate for high income people the second home mortgage deduction,” Romney said, also floating the possibility that he’d do away with state income and local property taxes.

Since Romney’s comments at the event were reported, his campaign has made the fundraisers open to the press and the candidate has stopped going beyond his standard stump speech.

Foreign policy and the Afghan war

Romney has spoken about his foreign policy vision largely in terms of tone and posture. Unlike Obama, Romney says, he won’t “apologize for America.” He’ll speak out more strongly against regimes he views as hostile, like Iran and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

There are a few areas where Romney’s policy is relatively specific: he has pledged to expand the Navy, label China a currency manipulator, push through new trade and security agreements in Latin America and never openly criticize Israel. Romney has spoken enthusiastically about missile defense and opposed Obama’s arms reduction efforts with Russia.

As far as specific global crises go, Romney’s proposals have ranged from the cautious to the nonexistent. He criticized Obama in a November debate for endorsing a quick drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, saying this isn’t “time for America to cut and run.” But he hasn’t announced his own war strategy, except to listen to “the generals.” The Afghanistan policy on his website includes one bullet point: “Ensure Buy-In from Afghan and Pakistani Governments.”

He blasts Obama’s track record on Iran, saying the president should have imposed tougher sanctions earlier and supported democratic uprisings in 2009. A second Obama term would mean a nuclear weapon for Iran, Romney says; a Romney administration would not.

Looking ahead, though, Romney’s approach is as vague as Obama’s: escalating diplomatic and economic pressure while reserving the option of a military strike. There’s little obvious distinction on North Korea, either.

And forget about an Israeli peace plan or anything of the kind. Romney told the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington this month that his Israel policy would be to “do the opposite of Obama” – a comprehensive strategy, in a way, but not a detailed one.

Romney has weighed in on the conflict in Syria, saying the U.S. should work with allies to get arms to opposition forces. But he has rarely mentioned Syria in his campaign, and has resisted calls by other Republicans – such as John McCain – for air strikes on the Arab state.

Regulating Wall Street

Romney has been crystal clear about his view of the Dodd-Frank banking law passed by the Democratic Congress and signed by Obama: it has to go.

As to what he’d put in its place, Romney is considerably hazier.

Romney says he doesn’t just want to tear down the banking reform law and let Wall Street run wild and free. Romney’s campaign has criticized the Volcker rule, which regulates certain kinds of proprietary trading and wants major changes to the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But Romney says he supports regulation of the derivatives market, and wants to rollback the government role in housing and mortgages, which he views as deleterious. On his campaign Web site, Romney pledges to “repeal Dodd-Frank and replace [it] with [a] streamlined, modern regulatory framework.”

The contents of that “framework” are almost entirely unknown. Romney policy adviser Lanhee Chen offered the closest thing to detail in an early June interview with Bloomberg TV’s Al Hunt. Chen insisted that Romney would not support returning to a “dog- eat-dog kind of situation where there’s absolutely no regulation.”

“Gov. Romney has made clear that we do need some regulation of derivatives trading, that we do need to have some kind of consumer protections in place, that we do need to look seriously at things we can do to ensure that the financial services industry is regulated in a reasonable way,” he said. “But Dodd-Frank is really not the answer. And so, you know, I think we have to resist the temptation to caricature what a post-Dodd-Frank world looks like.”

At a campaign rally in Michigan this week, Romney showcased his standard message on banking reform.

“Who wants four more years of Dodd-Frank that makes it harder for banks to make loans to small business?” Romney asked supporters, drawing a loud “No!” from the crowd.