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"  Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo-op purposes by New York Times columnist David Brooks, awoke with a start from the sound sleep he was enjoying in front of the fire in the clubroom of the Young Fogies Club. He was startled into consciousness by the sound of his own voice. This, Moral Hazard found puzzling, since he knew he could not talk. Nevertheless, the men in the easy chairs were all looking at him, and he heard himself say, &amp;quot;Center-right, moral tone,&amp;quot; and all the men in all the easy chairs laughed. Moral Hazard was confused, not only by the fact that he apparently was talking, but also that he was making no sense. If I were able to speak, he thought, I would be able to fashion something better than this. His voice then interrupted his thoughts. &amp;quot;Edmund Burke, large gas grills,&amp;quot; he appeared to say. Moral Hazard looked across the room. Master was sunk deep in his chair, hidden completely by that morning&amp;#039;s Times Of London. Suddenly, Moral Hazard understood. Master was practicing his ventriloquism again. From time to time, Moral Hazard knew, Master was able to throw his voice, so that people \u2014 and, yes, dogs \u2014 began to sound like him at a considerable distance. He did it with young Douthat, the club boy, all the time. Occasionally, he managed the not inconsiderable trick of making everyone on the set of The News Hour sound like him. Moral Hazard admitted that Master had become quite good at it. He just didn&amp;#039;t like being made to play the dummy, was all. &amp;quot;ALEXANDER HAMILTON!&amp;quot; Moral Hazard appeared to shout at Douthat, as the latter scurried across the carpet, emptying ashtrays and collecting empty brandy snifters. Jesus, thought Moral Hazard, that&amp;#039;s enough of this. He walked slowly into the pantry, where he usually hid out when spirits got high in the clubroom. Jacques, the sous-chef, slipped him a little of that night&amp;#039;s chateaubriand. Moral Hazard finished that off, and settled down to lick his balls in deep contemplation. There has to be more to life than this, he thought. If I&amp;#039;m going to be a circus act, it might as well be in a real carnival, where I could learn to jump through flaming hoops while hundreds of people cheer. And he fell asleep again, even deeper this time, and saw himself sitting down backstage after the show, talking shop with the lions while the trapeze artists got drunk together and fell off the fence. Yeah, dreamed Moral Hazard, that&amp;#039;d be cool. Ladies and gentlemen, I&amp;#039;d like to use the opening minutes of this debate a little differently. I&amp;#039;d like to say that I wish everybody could have known my father, George Romney. He was a great public servant and I&amp;#039;ve always tried to live up to his example. The problem is that you get caught up in the competitiveness of a campaign and all the consultants want to make you something you&amp;#039;re not. Except, of course, for that business about releasing his tax returns. And that business about saying what he really believed about Vietnam. And that business about taking a bold stand for civil rights when people were still getting shot over the issue in the south. My father actually stood for something beyond his own ambition, and that&amp;#039;s why he never got nominated. What a sucker my old man was. I&amp;#039;ve allowed that to happen to me. I&amp;#039;m a nonideological guy running in an ideological age, and I&amp;#039;ve been pretending to be more of an ideologue than I really am. I&amp;#039;m a sophisticated guy running in a populist moment. I&amp;#039;ve ended up dumbing myself down. It hasn&amp;#039;t even worked. I&amp;#039;m behind. So I&amp;#039;ve decided to run the last month of this campaign as myself. A poor black child. The next president is going to face some wicked problems. The first is the &amp;quot;fiscal cliff.&amp;quot; The next president is going to have to forge a grand compromise on the budget. President Obama has tried and failed to do this over the past four years. There&amp;#039;s no reason to think he&amp;#039;d do any better over the next four. Because my party is insane, which is why I had to &amp;quot;pretend to be more of an ideologue than I am&amp;quot; in order to get nominated. He&amp;#039;s failed, first, because he&amp;#039;s just not a very good negotiator. You don&amp;#039;t have to believe me. Read Bob Woodward&amp;#039;s book, &amp;quot;The Price of Politics.&amp;quot; Obama spent the last campaign promising to be postpartisan and then in his first weeks in office, in the fullness of his victory, he shut down all cooperation with Republicans and killed any hope of bipartisan cooperation. Furthermore, he&amp;#039;s too insular. As Woodward reports, he&amp;#039;s constantly leaving people in the dark - his negotiating partners and people in his own party. They&amp;#039;re perpetually being blindsided and confused by his amorphous positions. There&amp;#039;s no trust. If I were in business, there&amp;#039;s no way I would do a deal with this guy. Of course, I wouldn&amp;#039;t. I couldn&amp;#039;t fire him and I couldn&amp;#039;t outsource the Department of the Interior to China. Besides, look over there, Bob Woodward! Watergate! Forget the other 15 books describing the unprecedented intransigence of the Republican minority, and Draper&amp;#039;s book about the flock of loons who descended on the Capitol in 2010. Bob Woodward! Watergate! The second reason there&amp;#039;s been no budget compromise is that Republicans have been too rigid, refusing to put revenue on the table. I&amp;#039;ve been part of the problem. But, globally, the nations that successfully trim debt have raised $1 in new revenue for every $3 in spending cuts. I will bring Republicans around to that position. There&amp;#039;s no way President Obama can do that. And I&amp;#039;ll get around to it, just as soon as I find where Grover Norquist and Jim DeMint buried the mason jar containing my balls. Instead, an administration makes a thousand small decisions, each of which subtly adds to or detracts from a positive growth environment. The Obama administration, which is either hostile to or aloof from business, has made a thousand tax, regulatory and spending decisions that are biased away from growth and biased toward other priorities. American competitiveness has fallen in each of the past four years, according to the World Economic Forum. Medical device makers, for example, are being chased overseas. The economy in 2012 is worse than the economy in 2011. That&amp;#039;s inexcusable. No, in fact, I can&amp;#039;t name three of the &amp;quot;thousand tax, regulatory, and spending decisions&amp;quot; to which I am referring. Why do you ask? My administration will be a little more biased toward growth. It&amp;#039;ll treat businesses with more respect. There will be no magic recovery, but gradually the animal spirits will revive. Ungawa! Animal spirits come! Credit Default Swap good! Ever seen me in a loincloth and a necklace of lion&amp;#039;s teeth? I am so hot. The third big problem is Medicare and rising health care costs, which are bankrupting this country. Let me tell you the brutal truth. Nobody knows how to reduce health care inflation. There are two basic approaches, and we probably have to try both simultaneously. And I&amp;#039;ll do it, too. Right after I stuff my running mate and his voucher plan in a sack and toss the sack into a live volcano, I&amp;#039;ll get right on that. The first, included in Obamacare, is to have an Independent Payment Advisory Board find efficiencies and impose price controls. The problem is that that leaves the painful cost-cutting decisions in Washington, where Congress rules. Congress wrote provisions in the health care law that have already gutted the power of the advisory board. The current law allows Congress to make &amp;quot;cuts&amp;quot; on paper and then undo them with subsequent legislation. That&amp;#039;s what Congress always does. The second approach, favored by me, is to scrap the perverse fee-for-service incentives and use a more market-based approach. I think there&amp;#039;s ample evidence that this could work, but, to be honest, some serious health economists disagree. (To be fair, here Romney, The Actual Candidate, and Romney, The Bruised Apple of David Brooks&amp;#039;s Eye, are getting very close. Even Brooks&amp;#039;s pretend Romney is beginning to waffle all over the place.) I&amp;#039;m willing to pursue any experiment, from any political direction, that lowers costs and saves Medicare. Democrats are campaigning as the party that will fight to the death to preserve the Medicare status quo. If they win, the lesson will be: Never Touch Medicare. No Democrat or Republican will dare reform the system, and we will go bankrupt. At last, I&amp;#039;ve tried to be on the level with you. This president was audacious in 2008, but, as you can see from his negligible agenda, he&amp;#039;s now exhausted. I&amp;#039;m not an inspiring conviction politician, but I&amp;#039;ll try anything to help us succeed. You make the choice.  Okay, I choose Romney, The Actual Candidate. He&amp;#039;s much funnier. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16033/david-brooks-opening-statement-column-13301725/?src=rss>