It's getting down and dirty in election land. Last week, President Barack Obama's campaign suggested Mitt Romney might be guilty of a felony for filing misleading papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission (a charge The Washington Post discounted); and Romney's team aired a new ad portraying Obama as a liar.
The candidates are orchestrating rival campaigns of character assassination. Obama casts Romney as a wealthy, greedy, coldhearted investor who put profits over people and who "outsourced" jobs. Romney's Obama is a power-hungry interventionist whose meddling policies alienate business, slow the recovery and threaten Americans' freedom.
There are more charitable and revealing ways, I think, of contrasting the candidates than these partisan caricatures. I would call Obama a "distributionalist" and Romney an "expansionist." By "distributionalist," I mean that Obama sees government as an instrument to promote economic and social justice by redistributing the bounty of a wealthy society. Economic growth is not ignored but tends to be taken for granted or treated as a less important priority. How else, for example, to explain Obama's decision to push the Affordable Care Act (the ACA or "Obamacare") — a huge new social program — in the midst of the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression?