Although Mr. Collins, a Republican from Salem County, said he favored the tax increase, he did not have enough votes from members of his own party because a few conservative Republican Assembly members had already publicly declared their opposition to the tax increase.
And Representative Paul D. Ryan, an influential conservative Republican from Wisconsin, said that while Mr. Kerry "claims he wants to relieve the squeeze on the middle class," he had "never met a tax increase he didn't like".
Out of the gate, Jackson attempted to out-insult the provocative Stewart, saying he "has had some dealings" with the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamic group, and "has never seen a tax increase. . . he didn't like". Reached in Alabama, where he was campaigning for U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, Stewart offered a terse response to Jackson's claims.
While Pence would have been entirely accurate to say, "If the Democrats fail to extend the expiring tax cuts, all tax brackets will increase," he didn't.
Mr. Ryan pointed to his work with Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Alice M. Rivlin, a Clinton administration economist, on a Medicare overhaul that would include subsidized private competition, but on the broader question of whether spending cuts need to be twinned with tax increases, he does not give an inch.
While he wouldn't rule out tax increases, he did say they would be a last resort now that so many businesses are tempted to leave anyway.
The governor's carefully crafted words also offer him the option of employing another possible explanation: telling voters that when he said no tax increases, he did not mean every tax.
Even Ronald Reagan understood that when the deficit is out of control, you "have to propose both spending cuts and tax increases – he did it multiple times," Mr. Obama said, adding: "He could not get through Republican primaries today".
And while he hedged a bit against calling student loans an outright "bubble" and from asserting that easy credit (in form of those loans) was the sole reason for massive tuition increases, he did refer to the idea that we're arguably in a sort of mass delusion about the value of a four-year degree as an essential part of the problem.
