What’s New Today
Story
# 1 thru #3 are signs of desperation by the Democrats. #4 is a link so you can read the Ryan
Plan. #5 asks if the Ryan plan cuts
Medicare. #6 explores how Obamacare cuts
Medicare. #7 explains why Obama and the
Democrats are losing the Medicare battle.
#8 takes a look at the Biden factor and #9 asks if Obama can adapt to a
new strategy.
Today’s
Thoughts
"the revelation that Biden’s “very good friend” and donor,
John Hynansky, received a taxpayer loan
to open a business selling foreign luxury cars in a foreign country using
foreign labor stands in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign charges
that the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan
campaign stands for breaks for big business and shipping American jobs
overseas.
It’s
interesting that we have a left wing
shooting at the FRC and the coverage by the MSM is mostly silence. Of course
the MSM isn’t biased and if you don’t believe that ask them or the
Democratic Party.
Since
World War II, 10 U.S. recessions have been followed by a recovery that lasted
at least three years. An Associated
Press analysis shows that by just about any measure, the one that began in June
2009 is the weakest.
Lie of the Day
“I don't think you or anybody who's been watching the
campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country. We've always
tried to bring the country together,” President Obama said in an interview with
Entertainment Tonight.
1. Signs of Desperation—Obama
Negative Campaigning
While President Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 promising to
rise above petty politics, he’s
showing a more down-and-dirty side in
his re-election campaign.
Obama this week tested a joke on the
stump alluding to Republican Mitt Romney’s treatment of a family pet, and he
declined to back away from a controversial jab at Romney by Vice President Joe
Biden. His campaign has refused to condemn an ad by independent pro-Obama
super-political action committee that Republicans complained was a low blow.
The rhetorical warfare has provoked anger from Romney. He
accused Obama of running “a campaign of division and anger and hate” that disgraces
the presidency.
“It is a lot different than Obama
’08,” said Dan Schnur, chairman of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at the
University of Southern California and a former Republican strategist.
Obama’s willingness to wage a more negative campaign
reflects “the difference between being a challenger, and an incumbent in a bad
economy,” Schnur said. “You have to get some
blood on the other guy.”
The approach is unified. Obama
campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt said Romney’s complaint “seemed unhinged.”
Campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the
president is facing an opponent who has been making assertions about Obama’s
record that are “full of bold-faced lies.” …
It is my belief that Obama wouldn’t recognize the truth if
it sat down next to him and gave him a high five.
2. Signs of Desperation—Why the
Democrats should be worried
"Hey Paul!" yelled an elderly woman while Ryan was
placing his order with the cashier. "Good luck! Kick ass!"
The well-wisher, Erma from Howland, Ohio, told me later that she's not worried that Ryan and Romney
would end Medicare. "I don't believe it," she said. "Because
Obama has a bigger plan to rob Medicare of $617 billion."
"We better worry about
Obamacare before we worry about Ryan," added Erma, a
self-described conservative. Erma wasn't the only conservative senior
citizen at the Original Hot Dog Shoppe to demonstrate that the party faithful
have absorbed the Medicare message being pushed by the Romney-Ryan campaign
this week.
"Oh, don't believe none of that
stuff," Eleanor Costantino,
a senior citizen from Warren, told me when I asked her if she was worried about
Romney-Ryan taking away Medicare. "It's
all nothing but a bunch of lies!"
"He's going to save Medicare," chimed in Eleanor's
friend Karen Combs from Cortland, Ohio. "There's
$700 billion under Obamacare coming out of Medicare, and seniors should be more
frightened over that."
If you are a Democrat that is exactly what you don’t want to
hear and it’s even worse since these are seniors in Ohio. The Democrats should be very afraid.
3. Signs of Desperation—Obama reaction to Ryan
…"Both campaigns see the Ryan pick as something that makes Wisconsin more competitive. When we visited this week, every Republican we spoke to suggested it would help keep a Republican base already energized by the recent recall election fired up and hungry for more in November." said CNN Chief National Correspondent John King.
"And we saw the impact on the Obama campaign firsthand. Within hours they rewrote their script for calls to voters to add some sharp criticism of Ryan and his Medicare plan. But the way they did it was telling: A couple of lines about how is a nice guy, sure, but then the segue to the attack and a script that included a line saying President Obama was more in tune with working class voters," added King.
According to the CNN/ORC International Survey, which was conducted entirely after Romney added Ryan to the GOP ticket, 49% of registered voters in Wisconsin say they back President Barack Obama, with 45% supporting Romney. The president's four point advantage over the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is within the survey's sampling error.
Two other polls conducted last week, before the Ryan announcement, indicated the president holding a single digit advantage in a state he won by 14 points in the 2008 presidential election…
Watch over the next month and see more states fall into the
toss up category. The Democrats are
starting to have to play defense much sooner than they anticipated.
4. The Ryan Plan
The
Obama Campaign, having no accomplishments on which to run, has been attacking
Paul Ryan’s plan for saving the sinking ship that is Medicare. Hoping to scare seniors by using false information,
the Obama Campaign has been spreading lies about Ryan’s plan with the hope
that if repeated often enough, it will become fact. While Obama has raided
Medicare to fund Obamacare, his catastrophe of a healthcare overhaul, he still
insists on spreading lies about Ryan’s plan that allows for more choices for
seniors. Here, Paul Ryan discusses and
explains his plan and why it’s effective. Take a look.
You’re going to hear a lot about this so you might as well
get it from the Ryan’s own mouth. He’ll
be a lot more truthful than the Democrats will be.
5. Does the Ryan Plan Cut Medicare?
Republican vice presidential
candidate Rep. Paul Ryan moved to
explain why the federal budget plan he proposed as House Budget Committee
chairman included more than $700 billion in cuts to Medicare Thursday,
arguing that he was using President Barack Obama's baseline that already
included those cuts when crafting the budget.
Since the Medicare cuts were part of Obama's health care
law, Republicans included that projected spending in their proposal, Ryan said. He justified it by pointing out that the House later voted to repeal the health care law, which would have
stripped out those cuts, and said that Republicans never proposed them.
"First of all, those are in the baseline, he put those
cuts in," Ryan said, referring to Obama. "Second of all, we voted to repeal
Obamacare repeatedly, including those cuts. I voted that way before the
budget, I voted that way after the budget. So when you repeal all of Obamacare
what you end up doing is that repeals that as well."
"In our budget we've restored a
lot of that," Ryan continued. "It gets a little wonky but it was
already in the baseline. We would never have done it in the first place. We voted to repeal the whole bill. I just
don't think the president's going to be able to get out of the fact that he
took $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare."
If you cancel Obamacare the money taken from Medicare goes
back to Medicare. It’s pretty
simple. If Obama wants to cancel
Obamacare he could claim the same thing.
6. How does Obamacare cut Medicare?
Presumptive GOP vice presidential
nominee Paul Ryan should begin his campaign rallies by blasting Eric Clapton's
"Before You Accuse Me (Take a Look at Yourself)." This blues tune
perfectly reflects the neurosis of President Barack Obama and his troops. They constantly bellow that Mitt Romney and
Ryan lust to cut Medicare. Yet, in fact, it is Team Obama that already has
chopped deeply into it.
Obama and his comrades echo each other on this point.
Republicans are "weakening the safety net," Obama said Monday. "Romney and Paul Ryan are dead set on slashing
seniors' Medicare benefits to pay for more millionaire tax breaks,"
Democratic strategist Kelly Ward wrote donors on Tuesday. "It's a rigged deal," Obama political
guru David Axelrod told MSNBC on Thursday. "The Ryan budget, endorsed by
Mitt Romney, would end Medicare," screamed MoveOn.org.
Unfortunately for Democrats, who
have sung this song since last year, the truth refuses to harmonize with their
vocals. Indeed, PolitiFact.com crowned
the left's "Republicans voted to end Medicare" mendacity as "the
2011 Lie of the Year."
The Washington Post
caught Democrats with their hands, arms and shoulders in the Medicare cookie
jar.
"Romney is right," read last Tuesday's
WashingtonPost.com headline. "Obamacare cuts Medicare by $716
billion." Post reporter Sarah Kliff's
extensive evidence explains "all the various Medicare cuts Democrats made
to pay for the Affordable Care Act" -- aka Obamacare.
For starters, the Congressional
Budget Office director, Douglas W. Elmendorf, wrote House Speaker John Boehner
on July 24. Elmendorf determined that if Congress repealed Obamacare,
"spending for Medicare would increase by an estimated $716 billion over
that 2013-2022 period." Conversely, if Obamacare remains law, so will
Obama's $716 billion in Medicare cuts.
The Washington Post conveniently
itemizes Obama's 10-year decreases in Medicare:
-- The lion's share, some 34.8 percent or $249.2 billion, involves
"reductions in how much Medicare reimburses hospitals and private health
insurance companies," as Kliff observes. Team Obama lamely argues that
these are not Medicare-benefit cuts. Nice try. This is like saying that
Washington is not reducing student aid, just limiting tuition payments to
colleges and university systems.
-- Another 30.2 percent of Obama's Medicare reductions, or about $216.2
billion, is gouged out of Medicare Advantage. This highly popular program
lets seniors choose among private insurers. But, since Obama knows best, this
market-friendlier approach gets catapulted off a cliff.
"These cuts will force seniors to pay $3,700 more for
their health care by 2017,"
according to the Ethics and Public Policy Center's James C. Capretta. "The
Medicare trustees project that the cuts will drive some 4 million seniors out
of Medicare Advantage plans between 2012 and 2018."…
The reductions in reimbursement to medical providers is cost
controls that will result in fewer doctors, hospitals, etc. willing to take
Medicare patients. Right now this
reimbursement is on the edge with some doctors and hospitals being unwilling to
treat Medicare patients. This will
explode that number and is a very real threat to senior’s health. Grandma doesn’t get a knee replacement so
Suzie can get free birth control.
7. Why Obama is losing the Medicare battle
…Anyone who thought that the selection of Paul Ryan would
force the president and his team to abandon purely negative campaigning had
better think again. The presence of Ryan on the ticket
has merely changed the target of
Obama’s negative campaign from Mitt Romney’s performance at Bain Capital to
Paul Ryan’s plans to make sense of our fiscal condition and preserve Medicare,
unchanged for those 55 years old and over, reformed for other Americans. The Obama campaign remains stuck on
negative, claiming that Ryan would destroy Medicare and Medicaid “as we know
them.” How Obama would preserve these programs “as we know them” remains a
deeper secret than his well-publicized cyberattacks on Iran. The simple fact is that existing
entitlements, gobbling ever-larger portions of our GDP, cannot survive “as we
know them.”
I am reminded of a wonderful scene
in an Elaine May movie (A New Leaf) in which Walter Matthau’s attorney is trying to explain to him that he has
squandered his entire huge inheritance. To which an uncomprehending Matthau, waving a check that has bounced,
replies that his check must be honored, a position he maintains despite his
lawyer’s repeated explanation that, having spent more than the income from his
inheritance for many years, he has no more capital: “You don’t have any money.”
President
Obama certainly cuts a more elegant figure than the late, rumpled Walter
Matthau, but he, too, has no money to
back his spending plans. Which is why the Democrats are sticking to their
negative campaign rather than saying just how they propose to save these
entitlements as we know them. Matthau solved his problem by marrying an
extraordinarily wealthy heiress; Obama
has solved his problem—our problem—by borrowing almost 40 cents to cover every
dollar he spends. That can’t go on, and won’t be solved by soaking the
rich: Squeeze them dry and he won’t affect the rounding error in his deficits...
Medicare has become a great issue for Romney/Ryan and a
toxic one for Obama/Biden. This isn’t
the way the Democrats saw it going. But
after hearing for the last 20 years the programs were going broke, the
Democrats negative ads seem out of touch with reality. The seniors today are smarter than what the
Democrats want to give them credit for.
8. The Biden Factor
You know it’s bad when Sarah Palin says you’re not fit to be
vice president.
Palin’s gaffe-prone journey on the
2008 GOP ticket could be a walk in the park compared to what Vice President Joe
Biden and the Obama campaign are facing this fall.
Biden’s
blunders four years ago, such as imploring a man in a wheelchair to “stand up,”
were embarrassing but never really hurt Obama.
But with one horrific reference to slavery, that
has all changed now, and the president —
not Mitt Romney — is the one with the running-mate problem.
Getting
attention is never good for a vice presidential candidate. They’re supposed
to be boring. In 1988, Michael Dukakis’ running mate, U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen,
ran what his aides called the “champagne campaign” because he was done by
cocktail hour.
But the party is over for Joe. Barring a complete
meltdown, Biden is not going to be replaced with Hillary Clinton. So let’s take
a look at what could happen in the coming weeks, assuming the media will not
just let “Joe be Joe” and ignore him.
Obama’s
handlers will try to clamp down on Biden and make sure he sticks to the script,
just like his boss. That would be a mistake. Obama needs a real guy on the
ticket, not a teleprompter reader.
“Joe Biden’s
appeal is based on his genuineness,” said Boston public relations guru
Larry Rasky, a close friend of the vice president. “Any staff person who tries
to tell Joe Biden what to do ought to re-examine how they do their job.”…
Biden is not a major problem but that doesn’t mean he isn’t
a problem. His gaffes will make news and
throughout the campaign he will be compared with Paul Ryan. He was beaten pretty badly in the VP debate
by Sarah Palin and he most likely will be eviscerated by Paul Ryan on October
11. He will become part of a feeling, a
feeling that Obama is not going to win.
9. Can Obama adapt
to a new race?
Democrats
say that President Obama's unconventional strategy for the 2012 election hasn't
yet begun the crucial phase: the pivot to positivism.
Obama's
theory of the 2012 election was to do what other incumbents have feared to
attempt and open the campaign on a sustained negative note. The idea was to
destroy Romney's public image and then, with the Republican nominee in tatters,
set about the business of restoring some sheen to the president's somewhat
tarnished brand.
This
is sort of the same thing that Obama did in the White House. Obama came in
swinging hard and spent most of his first two years pushing an unpopular new
health-insurance entitlement. Then he undertook a "hard pivot" to
focus on the economy.
The
health law, though, consumed more time and more political capital than
Democrats had expected. Even with supermajorities in both houses of Congress,
the health law proved to be overwhelming.
The
result was a scorching defeat for Democrats in 2010. Even before the midterms
were done, though, Team Obama was promising a renewed focus on economic and
employment issues….
…Then
began Obama's spring offensive in which he and his team went on a
scorched-earth campaign against by-then presumptive Republican nominee Romney.
They had been expecting to face Romney all along, but the speed and
thoroughness with which Romney captured his party's nomination was surprising.
So
Obama rolled out the next phase of his campaign strategy: character attacks on
Romney. Even the gentlest political
scribes were amazed at how mean Obama was and how early. But many believed
that the attacks would work, and nothing succeeds with reporters like success.
And
after four months of the negative barrage against Romney, it looked like it was
finally paying off. Whatever damage the president had done to his own brand as
a healer and uniter, was being more than offset by Romney's crumbling
favorability ratings and Romney seemed to be exhausted.
And just at the moment, Romney
pulled the Ryan ripcord and changed the trajectory of the race.
A
look at the swing state polls starting to trickle in shows that Romney has at worst stopped his
deterioration and at best started outpacing the president. Ryan's choice
not only enthused the GOP base, but seemingly
convinced some independent voters fed up with the status quo that the moderate
former governor of Massachusetts was about some big ideas.
Romney has halved Obama's lead
in Franklin & Marshall's Pennsylvania poll and is either leading or
statistically tied in a slew of other battleground polls. Something good is happening
for Romney and it seems directly attributable to Ryan.
But the immutable fact is that
Obama did not ruin Romney before the current change took place. The hope with the sustained
barrage by Obama was that by this point, the president would have enough of a
cushion to switch to a positive closing argument. But here we are in a
deadlocked contest and Romney is still kicking.
The three phases of the Obama strategy
-- attack, pivot to positivism and then go like hell to get out the vote - are
still enact, but the schedule is looking a little iffy…
…And
there's this: Having been so negative
for so long, Obama's campaign may have poisoned the political atmosphere to the
point that the press gives Romney broad latitude in his attacks and voters
close their ears to any subsequent entreaties from Obama to see him again
as a man who can heal a broken political system.
An
interesting parallel for the president: It was the success of Republicans in
2010 that stymied his "hard pivot" to jobs. And it is the apparent
success of one House Republican, Ryan, as Romney's running mate that may
jeopardize Obama's pivot to positivism.
This is an interesting look at the Obama campaign and what’s
happened so far. The Medicare issue
seems to be not only a dud for the Democrats, but a winner for the Republicans.
