President Romney vs. President Obama

Had Mitt Romney won the 2008 election, what would be different today?

Somewhere out there in the multiverse, beyond space and time — perhaps in the place on the TV show "The Fringe,” where the characters Olivia and Walter's counterparts Fauxlivia and Walternate live — is a place in which President Mitt Romney won the 2008 presidential election. The specific reasons for Romney’s victory are not terribly important. Perhaps the fundamentalist preachers of the Republican Party endorsed rather than scorned Romney for his Mormonism. Perhaps traditional Republican power brokers were less willing to forgive John McCain for his previous forays into "bipartisanship." Probably Mitt Romney would have been better informed and appeared more of a leader in responding to the financial crisis than McCain. Add in a few missteps by the Democrats, and it might well have been Mitt Romney before whom John Roberts bobbled the oath of office in January 2009. It could have happened here, therefore it did happen somewhere out in the multiverse.

What do the American economy and economic policy look like right now on that President Romney branch of the multiverse?

Well, they look a lot like they look right here on earth.

President Romney would have provided support to troubled banks — capital injections and stress tests — but he would have avoided even a few targeted nationalizations of the banking system: He is, after all, a Republican.

He would not have pushed the Treasury to engage in large-scale quantitative easing through the Public-Private Investment Program or large-scale mortgage restructuring through the HAMP home mortgage modification program.

On monetary policy, Romney would most likely have reappointed Ben Bernanke and let the Federal Reserve proceed as it wished. On fiscal policy, Romney's Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Mark Zandi, and his National Economic Council Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, would have proposed a fiscal stimulus package that was 60 percent tax cuts and 40 percent spending increases. The Democratic Congress would then have bargained with the administration to produce a stimulus that was 40 percent tax cuts and 60 percent spending.

But, of course, all these policies are exactly what Obama and the Democratic Congress actually enacted.

On global warming, Romney would have abandoned economists' preferred Pigovian carbon tax for the complicated, corporatist and business-friendlier approach of a cap-and-trade system. But he would have been no more successful than Obama in assembling a Senate coalition to achieve anything.

On healthcare, Romney would have taken his signature Massachusetts health care reform and expanded it nationwide: we would have RomneyCare. But that is precisely what we do have.

I see only two key policy differences between RomneyWorld and ObamaWorld. Had Romney been elected president in 2008 we would not have repealed the military policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." And had Romney been elected president in 2008, Elizabeth Warren would not now be assistant to the president for Consumer Financial Protection.

Otherwise? As far as policy is concerned, we would be smack on the mark that we are on now.

But the politics would be very, very different.