Paul Ryan gave his first Florida speech as the Republican vice presidential candidate at The Villages, a large retirement community north of Orlando, on Saturday. Ryan???s speech went so well that the Romney campaign quickly built a Web advertisement around it, called ???Our Generation???s Time,??? highlighting Ryan???s declaration that ???Medicare should not be used as a piggy bank for ObamaCare.???
The Obama campaign appears to have been caught completely flat-footed by Romney and Ryan???s aggressive stance on Medicare reform. Obama???s hapless deputy campaign manager, documented liar Stephanie Cutter, was reduced to contradicting her own statements from just one week earlier about the ObamaCare raid on Medicare funding. As the Romney campaign was happy to point out, Cutter was describing the Medicare raid as an ???achievement??? in cost-cutting on last weekend???s talk-show circuit, but now she???s singing from her panicked campaign???s new ???math is hard??? playbook:
Cutter, by the way, is back to lying through her teeth on national television about when she knew the details of the phony ???Mitt Romney killed my wife??? story peddled by steelworker Joe Soptic, having apparently decided to whistle past the graveyard of her now-famous May 14 conference call in which she hosted Soptic telling his story.
Obama???s continued insistence upon putting Cutter forth as a surrogate, along with his refusal to condemn the Soptic ad, is a powerful indictment of this President???s personal honor and integrity. Stephanie Cutter is the perfect spokeswoman for Obama???s dishonest, fact-challenged position on Medicare.
You can tell the Romney-Ryan pushback on Medicare is killing the Obama ticket by the media???s desperate attempts to change the subject. For example, after sneering at The Villages as ???a hotbed of Republican retirees??? where ???free entertainment and boozy dances each night have helped this community of 60,000 seniors earn a somewhat double-edged reputation as Disney World for the Cialis set,??? the L.A. Times assures us that ???some Republican strategists??? think Medicare???s not even a big issue anymore, because the New Deal generation is dying off.
Then the Times spends a couple of paragraphs fretting that Medicare is distracting Romney from his vitally necessary focus on the economy. As if those were two separate issues! One of the major points Paul Ryan has long endeavored to make is that taxes, government spending, the pressure from entitlement programs, the national debt, and economic growth are closely related. The federal government???s relationship to the private sector is changing, from parasitic to carnivorous.
Romney and Ryan don???t look the slightest bit ???distracted??? when they make that argument. It???s the Obama team that has been going through a nervous breakdown over the past few weeks. Just ask Joe Biden??? if you can find him.
