April 18, 2012--In Quiet Rooms

After winning the New Hampshire primary back in January on the "Today" show, Matt Lauer asked Mitt Romney, "Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy?"

Romney responded, "You know I think it's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms. But the president has made this part of his [public] campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It's a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach."

But now we know what Romney talks about in those quiet rooms. Or, in the case of the recent $50,000-a-plate fundraiser in Palm Beach, a tent full of rich folks.

In public, Romney has been vague about just what he would do as president to cut the federal budget. But among the well-healed country-club set, overheard by a reporter, he let it fly--

"I'm going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I'm probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go," Romney said, according to NBC. "Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later."

HUD currently runs the Section 8 housing program and provides numerous programs and grants for development and housing for low-income families.

He also said he would take the Department of Education and "will either consolidate [it] with another agency or perhaps make it a heck of a lot smaller."

Then, acknowledging that he and his fellow Republicans have a problem attracting Hispanic voters, he said that they need a "DREAM Act" of their own because "we have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party." In contrast with his public statements that he opposes the DREAM Act (though he previously supported it while governor of Massachusetts) this seems to suggest Romney is in favor of some kind of path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

I am all right with many of these ideas, including others he revealed while under the GOP tent--to eliminated mortgage deductions for second homeowners and to close the tax loophole that allows high-income itemizers to deduct state and local taxes on their federal returns.

What I am not all right with is his propensity to not discuss any of this in public--with those of us he wants to vote for him and send him to the White House--but to reserve his most important policy thoughts for those who can come up with $50,000 each to hear them.

How ironic that he appropriately called out Barack Obama recently for his open-mic incident where he was caught telling outgoing Russian president Dmitry Medvedev that after the election in November he will have "more flexibility" to negotiate arms limitation treaties. I am decidedly not all right with this--I want to know directly what my president might be up to with the Russians and not have to overhear it.

In fact, I am also not OK with what candidate Obama said at a fancy fundraiser in April 2008, in a quiet room full of San Francisco liberals, when he wondered out loud why he was having difficulty winning over working-class voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.

Claiming that because they had become frustrated with economic conditions, "It's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Again, like Romney he may have a point--not a politically winning point of view, but an openly discussable one nonetheless. The sort that we the people should be mature enough to debate.