This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
By Eliot Spitzer
Slate.
NEW YORK — Vapid Mitt Romney returned with a foreign policy speech this week that was all hat, no cattle. Behind the bellicose language hid nary a meaningful policy suggestion. It was merely a series of bromides, designed to make him look tougher than the incumbent.
But here is an ironic twist. Gov. Romney repeatedly praised Gen. George Marshall — the late secretary of state and secretary of defense and a graduate of VMI, where Romney delivered his speech — for the vision, wisdom and leadership that gave birth to the eponymous Marshall plan. We all know that the bold series of expenditures by the United States, $13 billion during the period from 1948 to 1951, and another $13 billion spent by the U.S. in direct aid to Europe between the end of the war and the initiation of the Marshall plan, rebuilt Western Europe.
Why is Romney's praise for the Marshall Plan odd?
What was the Marshall plan? It was the 2009 stimulus in a different name at a different time — and large enough to do the job. How can Mitt Romney praise the Marshall plan if he is so disdainful of the stimulus? If the Keynesianism of the Marshall plan was so necessary and brilliant, what was wrong with the same concept in 2009?