Very Good Debt to Have

Too much has been made of exit polls showing Obama won voters whose primary consideration was "cares about people like me" as that question is almost certainly a dog whistle for "will not vote for a white man".

More damning for Romney were exit polls showing voters believed Obama's economic policies, more than Romney's, benefited the middle class. For all the talk that the G.O.P. must moderate, this may indicate that a return to strong economically conservative policies that can demonstrate how progressive policies crush the middle class is now needed.

An illustrative case in point is the situation of recent middle-class college grads, entering a workforce with six figure debt, but without marketable skills or decent opportunities. Conservatives can convincingly argue that government subsidies have mostly served to increase middle-class indebtedness, while enriching college administrators who, in return, do their part for Democrats. A Conservative could point out that a college education is (alongside housing), the largest investment middle-class families make, and ought be treated as such: Colleges ought have the same basic fiduciary obligations to their student/clients and responsibilities to disclose/report (eg, on historical economic outcomes of students in particular majors or who have taken particular classes or Professors) that other financial service providers have. Democrats who would oppose this would plainly be selling out middle class families. In this light, the administration's assertion that this is "very good debt to have" could have been made toxic.

Similar avenues also resonate: Recent college grad's job-prospects are particularly sensitive to entrepreneur killing over-regulation and taxation, more than any other group of Americans, they understand the difference between making $250K one year and being a millionaire and, as Ron Paul has proven, they are receptive when one explains how inflation targets cloud their future.

But when asked, instead of drawing sharp distinctions, Romney rattled on about scholarships and Pell grants and allowed the President to draw him into a discussion of whether or not he wanted Detroit to go bankrupt and, perhaps, in that moment, lost the election.