These ideas haven’t been a major emphasis for the last few months. They lack the idealistic grandeur of Obama’s first campaign and would represent incomplete progress towards their goals. You can make a perfectly good case, for example, that the economy needs an even larger shot of old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus than it would provide. You can make an even better case that the deficit reduction measures Obama has outlined would not bring the federal budget into long-term balance—that, looking past the next decade, it would take even larger tax increases or spending cuts, including those that hit the middle class. (My strong preference, as you might guess, would be for the former.)

But the idea that Obama hasn’t laid out a specific agenda for the future is just nonsense. And it’s particularly galling to hear it from conservatives, who have been pushing this argument for a while, when the charge happens to apply to their preferred choice for president. Yes, Romney talks constantly about his “five-point plan.” But it’s not really a plan. It’s a set of bullet points, largely bereft of dollar figures and other details. And while the Romney campaign has been touting studies that supposedly show his jobs agenda would create 12 million new jobs, that claim, too, turns out to be false—as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler pointed out this week.

Romney has been slightly—and I do mean “slightly”—more specific when it comes to his plans for reducing federal spending. He’s said he wants to cap it at 20 percent of gross domestic product, setting aside 4 percent for defense. That would be a devastating cut of historic proportions. Romney hasn’t given too many details about exactly which programs he’d slash, perhaps because voters might not love the idea of major cuts to food safety inspections or the FBI. But Romney has mentioned a few specific cuts—most prominent among them, a plan to dramatically reduce Medicaid spending. That plan would likely force many millions (like up to 27) to lose health insurance and/or leave elderly people with no way to pay nursing home bills.

On the campaign trail, Obama has spent a lot more time talking about these ideas, and why they are so awful, than he has about his own proposals, and why they are so great. But what's wrong with that? Getting people back to work more quickly and addressing our long-term fiscal problems are very important. Protecting Medicare, Medicaid, and essential government programs from the kind of assault Romney has described—an assault that would, in one way or another, affect just about every single American—is even more important. Talking about the future doesn’t have to mean talking about what you’ll do. It can also mean talking about what you won’t.