WASHINGTON
It looks and feels like a presidential contest, but at times it sounds like a national experiment in mind reading -- a great guessing game about the country's future.
The two campaigns insist that voters are about to make a momentous decision between sharply divergent visions for American life. But the candidates have largely failed to provide specifics about those visions, leaving voters to guess about the consequences of their choice. Almost half the voters say they want to know more about President Obama's plans for a second term, and almost two-thirds want to hear more about what Mitt Romney would do differently.
Romney has declined to reveal some crucial details about his tax plan. If he did, Romney's campaign has said, it would be harder to get Congress to go along with them later. "We want to get it done," said his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan.
Obama is equally vague about his second-term plans. He sometimes sketches his agenda as a list of questions, which he still needs to answer.
For anyone trying to forecast the effect of November's election, the best place to start is health care. That's because there's already a law on the books that will bring noticeable changes in the next term. To make these changes happen, all Obama has to do is win.
In 2014, for instance, most Americans will be bound by the rule to buy health insurance or pay a fee. At the same time, insurance companies will be banned from denying coverage for "preexisting conditions." And insurers will be prohibited from imposing annual dollar limits on benefits.
If Romney is elected, by contrast, he has promised to seek the law's repeal and allow individual states to craft their own health-care plans. If he were to succeed, the much-maligned mandate would vanish. But so would more well-liked pieces of the law, one of which allows children to remain on their parents' health-care plans until age 26 (which Romney has indicated he might want to restore), and bans insurance companies from imposing "lifetime caps" on coverage.
