Campaign promises: what they say is how they'll govern.

• Author: Bernstein, Jonathan
• Position: WHAT IF HE LOSES? - Republican primary

George W. Bush had a problem.

As he prepared to sweep to his party's presidential nomination with the endorsements of several GOP governors, and to run a moderate general election campaign against Al Gore, he didn't need to worry about social conservatives, thanks to a solid record on their issues and a great story to tell about his personal path to religion. But his strongest opponent in the early going was publisher Steve Forbes, running on a flat tax platform. Bush had no particular record of exceptional orthodoxy on taxes, and of course that was an area in which being his father's son was highly problematic, and therefore might have been vulnerable to attacks by Forbes.

The solution was obvious, and for the U.S. budget, fateful: Bush ran on a radical regressive tax cut, thereby destroying the rationale for the Forbes campaign and leaving the Texas governor a clear path to the nomination. And, as everyone knows, that tax cut also became part of Bush's general election campaign platform, and was eventually enacted into law in the massive 2001 and 2003 tax cuts--tax cuts that have set the terms of budget politics for the last decade.

The lesson: we can be governed now by measures that were adopted years ago, in some cases decades ago, based on what some candidate said in reaction to the particular dynamics of some now-obscure nomination battle.

Or, to be more blunt: presidents usually try to enact the policies they advocate during the campaign. So if you want to know what Mitt Romney or the rest of the Republican crowd would do in 2013 if elected, the best way to find out is to listen to what they are saying right now.

I suspect that many Americans would be quite skeptical of the idea that elected officials, presidents included, try to keep the promises they made on the campaign trail. The presumption is that politicians are liars who say what voters want to hear to get elected and then behave very differently once in office. The press is especially prone to discount the more extreme positions candidates take in primaries on the expectation that they will "move to the center" in the general election. Certainly everyone can recall specific examples of broken promises, from Barack Obama not closing Gitmo to George W. Bush and "nation building" to, well, you may remember this from the Republican National Convention in 1988:

And I'm the one who will not raise taxes. My opponent, my opponent now says, my opponent now says, he'll raise them as a last resort, or a...