Yes he has. He's also made many proposals to back that up.
But Romney in that quote is being very specific: he said he's eliminate a department in a past campaign, and his opponent ran against that and won. Therefore, he will not specify what his proposals imply for government cuts in this campaign. This is important, because he's endorsed a plan that will necessitate enormous cuts to government. But he won't say what, so as to not give his opponent ammo.
It's quite the admission.
Edit: this is neat.
http://www.barackobama.com/buffett-rule
I am stunned at how quickly the campaign operation has locked in. The rapid-fire issue ads and the incredibly accessible, straight up brilliant web design (not a single piece of the Buffet Rule calculator/associated pages are Flash. All jQuery and css stuff) are leading me down some interesting philosophical paths.
If you'll indulge me for a bit I wanted to talk about the pattern I'm starting to notice about internet content in general when it comes to the election.
I called that Romney would be the nominee back in, I don't know, October. Made $20 off of it actually. But I've maintained that it would be a close election unwaveringly since then, up to and including now. I've always thought that the difference made would be that this time, having known who they were running against for four years (rather than a matter of months in an election with no incumbent), the Republican campaign machine would kick into gear and be its old, embarrassingly effective self, putting the ability of Democrats to get out a clear message with broad appeal to shame and generally making the party look bumfuzzled.
But what I'm starting to suspect is that outside of the high-profile campaign trail, and all the glitz and flash of the debates, and shots of Obama on Air Force One juxtaposed with shots of Romney playing polo with golden mallets on Lipizzaner stallions or whatever he does... outside of all of that, there's going to be a silent campaign, a campaign that isn't frequently discussed out loud in public or even on TV ads, a campaign focusing on a vast audience of politically untethered, apathetic or independent voters, a campaign catering to people who spend a whole lot of time on Facebook and Youtube, on a scale that makes the efforts of 2008 look like a beta test.
And whether or not the Democratic party comes out of the high-profile campaign looking as good as they possibly could, and whether or not Romney's team manages to really step it up a notch in the debates... one thing I'm going to call is that
the Democrats will win this silent campaign. Their efforts on the internet will be quicker to the punch, more targeted and effective and just
cooler than those put forth by the Republicans. And maybe it's not the kind of thing that can make a difference in an election yet. But I have a feeling the results of this election will give us some insight on that count. Even if they wind up losing the election, I wager it'll have an impact on future ones.
Let me just give you some quick examples from the web.
As I said, I very much enjoy the Buffet Rule calculator linked above. Even regardless of what it advocates in terms of policy and politics, it's just a cool, well-designed web page. It gets its point across quickly; there aren't a lot of areas for input, so you don't mouse-hunt at all; it conveys the message to you with animation and at a pace decided by the people who made the page- not, please note, your reading speed, or more likely (let's be honest about our audience), your attention span. And it combines these elements (brevity, a friendly interface, and animation/timing) without requiring any outside plugins or third-party software. This stuff might not seem notable to you at all, but please bear with me.
Let's take a look at
Romney's site. Make no bones about it: it looks good! It's very similar to Obama's site. A red, white and blue theme, lots of content areas with rollover effects, and a top drop-down navigation menu.
Even the use of a stylized logo image in place of the candidate's full name in web-centric ways is the same, as seen in their Chrome tabs:
A stylized letter with a flag theme that attempts to make the candidate into a brand. Good stuff.
But if we dive a little deeper into the site- let's take the first featured content item, about
how terrible Obama was for women in the economy.
Now bear in mind this is the thing they most want you to click on when you hit the homepage. It gets a giant spotlight graphic.
Well... it's an infographic. And it's fairly well-done, I guess. It's pretty generic, with the little red people, but it's clean and all very "Web 2.0" and it's certainly nicer than a wall of text. But the page itself is sort of a disaster. I'll give them a pass on the header font... it's atrocious to me but I've given up trying to convince myself that the kind of audience we're talking about cares about fonts. But the graphic in itself is stuck in an iframe being loaded in from Scribd, which is a third party social media publishing website.
Scribd's logo and controls appear at the bottom, but that's a whole other can of worms. I just want to call your attention to how terrible this page is to use. It's designed so that the vast majority of content is "below the fold"- you
must scroll down to see what the page is trying to show you. But as soon as you start scrolling down, your focus gets hooked into the frame with the infographic, and it starts scrolling that instead of the rest of the page. Adjusting where you are on the page so that you can see most of the frame at once is tricky enough, but then when you scroll to the top of bottom of it, you immediately jump back to scrolling the full page. It is just
weird. It's much easier to read this infographic comfortably if you're not on the Romney website, which is a little hilarious. The page just doesn't work like you expect it to; and now you're putting a lot of faith in your internet reader to not just click the back button before even getting the message you want across. Again, this might not seem like a big deal at all to you, but just keep this stuff in mind.
Let's look at another page, and compare and contrast. Here's
Romney's page on taxes; you can get there from anywhere including the homepage by going to Issues -> Tax.
Again from a design standpoint we basically have a disaster. This is what I can see on my fairly high-res monitor. There's more than twice as much text to go as you see here that you have to scroll down for. Yet even though you must scroll to see the actual page content, there's all kinds of crap you can get to right from here. Social media icons. Download the PDF of the plan for tax recovery. Jump over to some commentary from a CEO. A "choose an issue" dropdown even though that exact dropdown is available at the top on every page...
It's just a mess. Here's what you see on a similar chunk of screen on
the equivalent page on Obama's site:
When looking at the design of the two side-by-side, I feel almost a sense of shame or personal embarrassment. Somewhere out there is the web designer for Romney's pages, and he puts in an honest day's work, I'm sure, and we'd probably even get along. But his whole official campaign website reeks of amateur, shoddy design one layer beneath the glossy exterior.
Obama's page uses the vertical space I can see on my monitor flawlessly. Instead of a dropdown, it breaks out the issue links horizontally so you can get to them with one click. Still, sacrificing vertical space like that is risky... except...
all of the page content is visible in the image above. That's the whole thing, above the fold. There's no more text if you scroll down. And there's room enough for that big, spacey, centered, header complete with the goddamn signature of the President of the United States. Most importantly, though, is that before there's even text content at all, given a huge amount of screen space is a "call to action"- an opportunity for your reader to
do something besides passively reading your page. This isn't a newspaper, you can sign up
right now to endorse the Buffet Rule if you want to. Also note the
eye-catching use of bold in each paragraph, like we do when we post a news story and want to make sure even the people who are
barely paying attention can still get the good bits. Look back at Romney's page, consider that there's a page and a half more of text like that, and "TL;DR" starts to come to mind. The content on Obama's site is just better, from schematic to execution.
So finally, what
is below the fold on Obama's tax page? Well, remember those social media icons on the top right of the Romney pages, under the somewhat uninspired phrase "Share This"? Well, the Google+ icon is a weird shape and that looks odd, but otherwise there's nothing wrong with them, right?
Wrong as hell.
It's just so bad, and so bizarrely bad to do this on an official campaign website.
The purpose of the entire website is to deliver the candidate as a brand- something that is easily remembered for what it is and consistent in presentation throughout. Why use the stock official logos of Facebook, Twitter, and that bizarre half-icon for G+, when you can use custom logos of infinite design? Why give way, way more established brand icons prime screen real estate on your website? Those icons immediately become the most recognizable thing on the page! It just boggles my mind.
What should you do instead?
Look, I know by this point I've bored the crap out of you, but hopefully you're starting to see what I'm pointing out. And the important thing is,
I believe this is all indicative of something larger. Something deeper and more basic; a difference between the two campaigns. I'm not saying Romney's site is unusable or even bad, by any metrics. I'm saying that I keep feeling, with each of these new issue ads on Youtube, with each live, razor-sharp stream from the White House website, with each page compared between the two campaigns... I keep feeling that Obama's silent campaign is one, two, a handful of steps ahead of Romney and the best they can hope to do is catch up. Obviously I don't think that these little website quirks are going to have a huge impact on the outcome of the election.
But a few steps is all it takes.
