MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Mourning In America.

Normally, America goes into overdrive as it exits a recession. This time we’ve been limping along. Why? Because the president is more concerned with tax-and-spend politics than aligning incentives to promote innovation, productivity, efficiency, and debt reduction. Obama’s stimulus failed on its own terms, his health care plan hangs like a sword of Damocles over small business, and his regulatory agencies—from the EPA to the NLRB to the Federal Reserve to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—have become economic uncertainty machines.

The president’s one good decision was agreeing to maintain current tax rates through December 2012. But he undercut his own policy by immediately pledging to raise taxes on incomes, dividends, capital gains, and estates at the first opportunity. Now it’s left to Republicans not only to prevent a major tax increase, but to remove, repair, and mend the fiscal and monetary damage left in Obama’s wake. The job won’t be easy.

The worst thing Republican presidential candidates could do is be timid and uninspired in their proposals for American renewal.

Read the whole thing. And here’s some background from Steve Carter.