Since TIME‘s Joe Klein has made a living in recent years bashing George W. Bush and promoting Barack Obama — and since he kind of likes Rick Santorum (?) — it’s not clear Mitt Romney will accept Klein’s electoral advice.
Still, Klein offers that advice in his latest column.
What remains for Romney is what he started with: the prospect of being able to manage the government. One word Romney’s handlers haven’t used to describe him during the campaign is reformer. It’s a good word, especially if you have the chops to back it up. Romney’s strongest arguments have to do with federal slovenliness. The whiff of crony capitalism attending Obama’s funding of the failed solar-energy company Solyndra is one example. The paralytic mess that the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill has engendered is another. An effort to tie environmentalism and overregulation, as with Obama’s killing of the Keystone pipeline, might also have resonance at a time when economic growth seems more important than preserving the American burying beetle (which is actually endangered by the pipeline). Romney can even argue that he implemented universal health care more efficiently than Obama’s 2,409-page labyrinth will.
