Dream Ticket, For Democrats

In a puff piece so sweet it would rot a whole set of teeth, The Washington Post's Philip Rucker described the marvelous time Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan had hanging out together, sharing a little man-love.    He wrote

On the campaign trail here, Romney has alternately called Ryan “a great leader,” “a wonderful speaker” and “a great man.” After Ryan endorsed him Friday in Appleton, Romney said: “This is a guy who’s willing to stand for something. He didn’t just go to Washington to be seen and to have a little job there. He went to Washington to make a difference"...

Later that day, it was Romney making the jokes. “This guy here, this is not my son,” he told one crowd in Middleton, poking fun of Ryan’s relative youth. Addressing another audience, he joked that Ryan was only 10 years old when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980.

“I did have a Reagan bumper sticker on my locker in the third grade,” Ryan offered.

“This guy was born conservative!” Romney quipped.

Paul Ryan is now the newest hot name being promoted as former Governor Romney's running-mate.      If only Romney were that stupid, we all could breathe a little easier, confident that Barack Obama, by far the lesser of two evils, will be re-elected in November.

Fortunately for Democrats, that Paul Ryan.      As chairman of the House Budget Committee, Ryan recently released a budget, which then was approved by the GOP-dominated House, which would harm the middle class, eviscerate programs for the poor, and leave defense spending untouched.    It would allow the deficit to rise less quickly than would President Obama's plan, only because it includes elimination of various tax deductions.     Those deductions are conspicuously unspecified, so if you're a middle-class homeowner, hold on to your wallet.    He's coming for it.

If Ryan were to join the ticket, he could dance and dodge through a lot of his phony budget.   Medicare, however, would be- to quote Jim DeMint in a slightly different context- his Waterloo.    As described by the Center for American Progress

The House budget would provide vouchers to Medicare beneficiaries to purchase either a private health insurance plan or the traditional Medicare plan. This plan would shift costs to seniors, making many seniors pay sharply higher premiums to stay in traditional Medicare and keep their current choice of doctors. For these seniors the choice of traditional Medicare would be a false one in reality.

This premium support plan would also limit growth in Medicare spending to growth in the economy plus 0.5 percentage points. But since it’s unclear how this cap would be enforced, it’s likely that the cap would limit the amount of the vouchers provided to beneficiaries. Since the proposed growth rate is much slower than the projected growth in health care costs, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that new beneficiaries could pay more than $1,200 more by 2030 and more than $5,900 more by 2050.

What’s more, private plans could “cherry pick” healthier seniors, driving up premiums for those who remain in traditional Medicare. And private plans would be able to undercut traditional Medicare in other ways, such as by offering free gym memberships or other perks. As a result more and more seniors would gradually shift to private plans over time. This gradual privatization of Medicare does not make sense because traditional Medicare costs less than comparable private coverage. But with fewer beneficiaries Medicare would have less leverage to contain the growth in health care costs.

The House budget would also shift costs to seniors by raising Medicare’s age of eligibility to 67. Some seniors who would no longer be eligible for Medicare would pick up employer coverage—but they would pay more in premiums and cost sharing. And since the budget would scale back or eliminate other coverage options, hundreds of thousands of seniors would become uninsured.

With age, Ryan has gotten a little more flexible.     Unlike in his previous plan, he now would allow Medicare spending to grow at .5% greater than the growth in the economy.    Moreover, instead of completely replacing Medicare with vouchers, he now would allow elderly to choose to remain in the Medicare program.     But as CAP explains, the projected, and likely, result is the same.       The healthier elderly individuals would select a private plan, a result which would be accentuated by various offers made to entice the healthier persons.

Those incentives probably, at the outset, would be almost irresistible.     It would not be unlike the arrival of Wal-Mart to an area.     Prices start out almost ridiculously low, service is great, and the store is kept clean.     As smaller merchants are driven out of business, the store's standards, whether in terms of prices, service, and/or ambiance, decline markedly because the competition has been eliminated.

So, too, is the GOP objective the elimination of Medicare.     Given the Republicans' overall strategy, you can hardly blame them: it is a government program that works, and we can't have that.     Messes up the whole narrative.

A national campaign by a Romney-Ryan ticket would dramatically draw attention to the Repub strategy.     President Obama already has begun the attack, labeling the GOP budget a Trojan horse," one “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it — a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class.”      Republicans can trot out their worn attack on Democrats for "class warfare";  but, if they're ready to drive a stake through Medicare, the strategy will only backfire.

Mitt Romney has only one road to victory- framing the election as a referendum rather than a choice.    Nothing will turn the campaign into one of choice, rather than referendum, faster than aiming a figurative sword directly at the older generation, unavoidable if Ryan is on the ticket.

President Obama, and Democrats generally in the Age of Obama, have faced serious obstacles gaining support from elderly voters.     Selection of Paul Ryan to run with a candidate who, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, himself pays a lower tax rate than the janitor at the grandchildren's school would obliterate those obstacles.    Go Mitt, go.




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Down On Government

Appearing on yesterday evening's edition of "Hardball" (transcript here), Mark Halperin generously provided a superb example of what Paul Krugman has referred to as

the cult of 'balance,' the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue,never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read "Views Differ on Shape of Planet."

The relevant part of the exchange between Halperin and Chris Matthews focused on the President's upcoming job speech and begins

Let me go to Mark first. Mark, I guess the simple question is, should the president go down the middle and offer up something that the Republicans will at least nibble at, or should he offer something so broad and New Deal that they`ll obviously reject it, but the American people on the Democrats` side will love it? What should he do?

MARK HALPERIN, "TIME," MSNBC SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: Chris, I think he should do whatever he thinks is most likely to create jobs. And my sense is, which it`s been through all year, is the thing that`s most likely to create jobs is finding common ground between John Boehner and Barack Obama.

I think the way the speech has been led up to, the things that are likely to be in the speech, the Republicans pre-reaction to what`s going to be in the speech, all suggest that this speech, even if it`s brilliantly delivered, is not going to produce the kind of bipartisanship that is required to get something approved by John Boehner, Harry Reid and Barack Obama.

MATTHEWS: But there`s a conflict. I know you know this, but there`s a conflict in what you just said. You said he should offer up a bipartisan offering, knowing it will be rejected.

HALPERIN: No, I think he should -- I think they should have been consulting with the Republicans all along. I don`t think it`s too late. But to go in and give the speech that it seems like he`s going to give, offering up new spending -- massive spending proposals with nothing on the other side that Republicans could say would be a trade-off that they -- they -- would be worth taking for them, I think is, again, going to lead again to the kind of gridlock and partisanship and bickering that isn`t going to solve the problem.

Krugman diagnosed the symptoms of the problem in which "nebulous calls for centrism" are made by people "who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. "

But this is a tactic in which the media merely bolsters and enhances a larger strategy of the Republican Party- one which is fundamental to the operation of American politics. Mike Lofgren in "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult" explained

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

Certainly, Republican presidents consistently expand the size of the federal government just as GOP governors, when their states are flush with revenues, expand the size of the governments they preside over. But for reasons both good and bad, the Democratic Party is seen by the American public and the media as the party of government and the Republican Party as the party against government. The GOP has motive to sabotage the reputation of government and works to make government fail, all the more to demonstrate to the electorate that government cannot, will not, succeed.

Into that environment steps the man heralding "we are the change we've been waiting for." In August, heslammed "partisan brinkmanship" and "dysfunctional government." Later in the month, the Presidentmaintained "what we've seen in Washington the last few months has been the worst kind of partisanship, the worst kind of gridlock. And that gridlock has undermined public confidence and impeded our efforts to take the steps we need for our economy."

On Labor Day, the President declared "the time for Washington games is over." Oh, he did add "we're going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party," as if unaware of the answer to his own question and could shame the GOP into responsibility. In 2009, Senator Jim DeMint said that the Obama health care proposal would be Barack Obama's Waterloo. The Senate Majority Leader saidthat his primary goal- not political goal, but goal- is to defeat President Obama. But for President Obama, the target (at least rhetorically) has been government, or partisanship, or Washington, not unlike the GOP's main target of the past 31 years.

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