A few days ago, Mori Dinaeur posted another criticism of my article on what a new Contract with America might look like, but I only saw it just now (follow the links for our previous round). Let’s take his criticisms and questions one by one.

1) Dinauer wonders why I didn’t go into how the economy affects the upcoming congressional elections. Answer: I wasn’t writing about the forces that affect the elections; thus I also say little about the depth of public opposition to Democratic health-care legislation.

2) My list of possible items for a new Contract does not include anything that directly addresses unemployment, which suggests that I am indifferent to it. I’m not indifferent to unemployment. But I think a) that it’s likely to continue to go down, and b) that there isn’t much Congress can do about it directly that is worth doing. If Dinaeur is truly interested in my views on these matters, he can consult recent issues of NR.

3) I believe that “a tax cut is the appropriate response to any economic situation.” Not true. I do favor middle-class tax cuts that would be balanced by other tax increases, and have written so many times.

4) ”Ponnuru is taking it as axiomatic that a tax cut will lead to hiring and hence doesn’t need to explicitly talk about unemployment.” Nope. I’ve never said that an expansion of the child credit, which is the principal tax cut I have in mind, would reduce unemployment, and don’t believe it.

5) “He would like to believe that the public responded in 2006 and 2008 not to endless war and economic ruin but ‘in part’ because Republicans didn’t promise to cut taxes.” Actually, what I’ve written is that Republicans lost in 2006 and 2008 in part because of the Iraq war, in part because of economic conditions, in part because of corruption, and in part because of the lack of a compelling domestic-policy agenda (including middle-class tax cuts). Not only are the views Dinaeur attributes to me, sans evidence, not my views, the opposition he sets up — if war and the economy were the main reasons for the voters’ shift, then Republicans’ tax platform can’t have contributed at all — makes no sense.

Note, by the way, that my point here about middle-class tax cuts is not some bit of right-wing dogma: Plenty of liberals have made a similar point, and I’ve had an uphill battle with my fellow conservatives on this subject.

6) “This is an article of faith in the conservative movement: the public, unchanging, ideologically conservative, is a permanent silent majority that occasionally takes leave of its senses and foolishly elects Democrats because Republicans lost their way and were not conservative enough. Ponnuru’s essay doesn’t say this explicitly, but his focus on a Republican strategy that exploits public anger without even acknowledging the source of the anger is quite telling.” My essay “doesn’t say [that] explicitly” because I don’t believe it and have in fact denied it dozens of times.

Now it is certainly the case that my article was compatible with some of the views that Dinaeur ascribes to me, but they certainly do not entail those views, and I do not in fact hold them. I don’t think I can reasonably be faulted for not spelling out my views on all of these topics in each article that I write.