A couple points of discontent: First up, like your NR colleague Dan Foster (on a recent bloggingheads.tv entry), I think there's something contemptible about this kind of focus-group rhetoric, which could be more honestly phrased as "I'm concerned about the 51% of voters who might vote for me". Are the newly poor, made so by the recession (or by Barack Obama, if you're campaigning in the GOP primary) now out of the scope of political concern until they rejoin their middle class brethren in boom times? Silly stuff.

Secondly, you know that even massively increased US drilling will only have a meagre effect on the global market price of oil, and that it would 5 or 6 years to see that effect, so the comparison between an immediately stimulative (or immediately wasteful, if you're an anti-Keynesian) payroll tax cut and longterm energy policy seems more suited to campaign rhetoric than policy journalism (natural gas and nuclear are a somewhat different story, but there's more overlap between Romney and Obama there than either left or right might care to admit).

Lastly, without concrete policy examples, the growth vs targeted response rhetoric ends up sounding like a Pawlenty-esque "we just need to aim for %5" nothingburger. I don't believe Romney's yet proposed anything that would really tackle corporatism in government or reverse the decline/stagnation in middle class wages (indeed the opposite in some case - if a 'confident market' solution works for Medicare, it should work similarly in the ACA).