If you haven’t read Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class, stop what you’re doing and read it now. The book is 120-pages long, but if you can’t make time for that, there is also a chapter summary. (Before you go with the summary, you should know, I read the full version, and I’m on vacation. Do you really want to let me one up you like that?)
The book is an extended argument for conservative policies to help the middle class.
One that seems particularly promising is an expanded tax credit for families with children. This is something that has been advocated for by Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah). Americans are having fewer children today than in the past, but the desire to have children has not changed. Altering the marginal tax rate won’t significantly help a family, but other tax breaks would. A tax break when you’re starting a family and having to build up finances to accommodate those changes would very much appeal to a young middle class family.
After finishing Room to Grow, I had two main questions. One was the obvious policy question: Are these ideas any good? How you answer that will largely depend on your ideological persuasion. The other question was political: Can someone run on this and win?
In a general election, I think they could, but I'm not sure the base is ready to accept a candidate who subscribes to this complete proposal. I'm not sure I see a way, in the current political climate, for this candidate to exist and not inadvertently become the next John Huntsman.
Now, Jon Huntsman is a moderate, and I don't think the ideas in the blueprint are centrist. They are very much conservative ideas, but I'm not convinced they can avoid the "moderate" or Jon Huntsman label, and in politics a label is everything.
Whenever I think about Republican candidates, I think of Matthew Continetti's idea of the Republican double bind. Conservatives have to overcome far more than stale policies.
Pete Wehner, who has the first essay in the book, is right: "Many conservative policies worked in the 1980s—but conditions have changed … and conservatives haven’t changed sufficiently with them." As a result, conservatives must demonstrate the ways past principles can be "applied to the rather different problems" of today, and still produce solutions.
If conservatives want to cross the bridge toward "reform conservatism," they have to first convince their base to walk with them.
The most immediate obstacle seems to be convincing primary voters to endorse an alternative to Obamacare. Sixty percent of the general population supports keeping the current law in place and "work[ing] to improve it" or replacing it with a Republican alternative, but 33 percent of Republicans want the law repealed and not replaced at all. In my experience, that sentiment seems to be particularly strong within the Tea Party movement. They may agree with the principles James Capretta advocates in the book, but that doesn’t mean they’ll support a comprehensive replacement.
This is without a doubt a phenomenal book. After reading it, I felt as though I had finally seen a comprehensive conservative vision of governance. But I’m still not sure that a candidate could adopt the majority of these proposals without alienating the GOP base. That’s the next thing to overcome.