In May, the Romney team
promised a laser-like focus on the economy.
But that was then and this is now. This week, Romney changed the
conversation when he caved to his right flank and chose Paul Ryan as his
running mate, a man known for a budget proposal
that's so toxic voters in focus groups, “simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”
Now,
the Romney team is trying to avoid a backlash against the Ryan plan's
most loathesome feature (replacing traditional Medicare coverage with a
private insurance voucher that would pay for a dwindling share of
seniors' healthcare bills over time) by following the old adage that if
you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, then just baffle them with
your bullshit.
So the Romney campaign and its surrogates are
doing everything they can to muddy the waters, hoping – and not without
reason! – that lazy political reporters will find all of this wonky
stuff so boring and confusing they'll just report what both sides say
and we'll end up in a draw over the issue come November. But there are a
number of good reasons why this strategy is unlikely to succeed.
1. The Big Lie
The
Romney camp's big lie is that Obama “raided” $700 billion from Medicare
to pay for his healthcare scheme. There are two big problems with this
story. The first is that Obama hasn't taken a single red cent out of
Medicare
benefits, and the second is that the Ryan plan
has the exact same $700 billion in cuts. Even the laziest political reporter can grasp the hypocrisy of attacking your opponent for something you've proposed yourself.
Here's
the scoop on Obama's (and Ryan's) “cuts.” They're not really cuts so
much as reductions in how fast Medicare costs will increase over the
next decade, and they come out of the hides of private insurers,
hospitals and other service providers, not seniors. As healthcare
analyst John McDonough
wrote in the
Boston Globe:
[But]
none of these reductions were financed by cuts to Medicare enrollees'
eligibility or benefits; benefits were improved in the ACA. Cuts were
focused on hospitals, health insurers, home health, and other providers.
Except for insurers, all the affected groups publicly supported the
reductions to help finance the ACA's expansion in health insurance to
about 32 million uninsured Americans.
The key
difference is what Obama and Ryan do with those savings. The Democrats
use them to pay for Obamacare, which expands healthcare to millions of
uninsured, and, according to the CBO, contains a bunch of provisions
that actually make Medicare's long-term finances more sustainable.
Here's a chart based on the CBO's numbers, courtesy of the
Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:
Romney
and Ryan say they'd use the money to reduce the deficit, but on that
point Ryan's numbers just don't add up. Ryan says he'll reduce the
deficit, but his tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthy are so
steep that there aren't enough loopholes in the tax code to offset them –
in order to pay for them, he'd have to
gut the entire government other than Social Security, public healthcare and military spending by 2050, which is not going to happen. That's why the Ryan plan will, as Alex Hern noted in the
New Statesman, “
inevitably lead to skyrocketing deficits.”
2. The Inescapable Reality
Ryan's
cuts don't stop there. And there is simply no way to get around the
fact that Ryan's plan saves the government money on Medicare by shifting
the burden directly onto the backs of seniors over time. The reason is
so simple even a Beltway political reporter can grasp it: as they're
intitially phased in, the vouchers will cover the costs of an average
private insurance plan, but their value will increase at the rate of
overall inflation, while healthcare costs grow much more quickly.
(At
this point, you may have noticed that at the heart of Ryan's plan is an
individual mandate that seniors buy private health insurance – with the
help of some taxpayer dollars. This is the worst form of "tyranny" when
a Democrat does it but apparently it's totally OK for a Republican.)
How much of the burden would be shifted onto seniors? The Congressional Budget Office
compared
Ryan's original “roadmap” (more on that below) with the way Medicare
works now, and found that in 2022, each beneficiary would be spending
$6,359 more out-of-pocket under Ryan's plan. And this would save the
government a grand total of just $615 per person. (He later sweetened
his vouchers a bit, so the number would now be smaller, but the
inescapable reality of his plan's structure persists.)
Now, Ryan
says that the magic of the free market will bring healthcare costs down,
but he hasn't offered any specifics in that area, so we are left with
only what the CBO analysis tells us.
3. Yes, The Ryan Plan Does Hurt Current Retirees
Republicans
have been trying to insulate themselves among seniors by stressing the
fact that current retirees can keep their Medicare just the way it is.
The Ryan plan, they say, will only effect people 55 and under. There are
two problems with this: first, it's simply untrue. Second, seniors are
not as selfish as the GOP believes them to be.
While Ryan's plan
exempts current Medicare enrollees from his voucher scheme, it also
repeals the Affordable Care Act, and the ACA has benefits that current
enrollees are seeing right now. Jonathan Cohn of the
New Republic explains that “if somebody is 'stealing' from seniors here, it's not Obama”:
[ACA
helps seniors] pay for prescription drugs, by filling the "donut hole"
in Medicare Part D coverage. It also eliminates out-of-pocket costs for
annual wellness visits, some cancer screenings, and other preventative
services. Those benefits have actually started already: In the first six
months of this year, according to the Department of Health and Human
Services, more than 16 million seniors took advantage of the free
preventative care provision.
Ryan's budget—which, again, Romney
has repeatedly embraced and said he would sign—actually takes those new
benefits away. The Part D donut hole would open back up. Access to free
preventative care would vanish.
This one hasn't
caught on with the media yet – they've been uncritically repeating the
claim that Ryan's plan wouldn't impact current retirees – but it's early
yet, and Democrats
say that this will be the next (and accurate) line of attack as the campaign progresses.
The
other gross miscalculation cynical conservatives have made is in their
belief that seniors only care about their own Medicare benefits. But as
one retiree interviewed at a Florida retirement home by NPR this week
put it,
"He's not going to do away with Medicare for seniors, but he will for
Medicare for my kids and my grandkids." The reality is that older
Americans really like Medicare, and want it preserved for their progeny,
and the polling bears this out – a CNN
poll
last year found that while 58 percent of Americans didn't like Ryan's
Medicare scheme, a whopping 74 percent of seniors opposed it.
4. Another Big Problem for Romney: Ryan's Specificity
Ryan's plan is anything but “brave” – studies by political scientists like Princeton scholar Larry Bartels (
PDF)
have found that politicians' votes line up with the interests of the
wealthiest Americans, “while the opinions of constituents in the bottom
third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect” on
their decisions. Ryan's plan fits that pattern to a T, and he's reaped a
fundraising windfall as a result.
But the kernel of truth is that
while the details of Ryan's plan aren't complete, it is an actual plan
with enough meat on its bones for wonks to analyze. That does take some
bravery, because Americans have always been suspicious of “government”
in the abstract, but quite fond of the specifics – of the services it
provides. This is why conservatives always prefer to avoid the details
of their plans and talk instead about airy notions of “freedom” or
“liberty,” or how rich people are supposedly “job creators.” Ryan's
problem, and now Romney's, is that while the numbers in his budget don't
add up, Ryan does in fact provide a bunch of them (
courtesy of the right-wing Heritage Foundation).
5. It Will be Hard to Have Their Cake and Eat It Too
This
leads to a big problem: Romney took on Ryan, in part, to get dimwitted
pundits to applaud the “seriousness” of his proposal, but at the same
time he's also trying to distance himself from the roadmap.
Ultimately,
it really depends on when you ask him. In interviews this week, both
Romney and Ryan insisted that Romney: A) has a plan that differs from
Ryan's “roadmap,” and B)
they will not release any details of that plan until after the election. Meanwhile, Romney has
said that if he's elected he'll sign Ryan's plan, and that his ideas to “reform” Medicare “
mirror” those in Ryan's roadmap.
That indecisiveness led to these two headlines appearing on Think Progress on August 14:
Romney Officially Embraces Ryan’s Plan For Medicare
Romney Campaign Chair Contradicts Candidate, Says Romney’s Medicare Plan Is ‘Very Different’ From Ryan’s Plan
The
campaign is flailing, and that will result in two issues for Romney as
the campaign goes forward. First, the absence of a detailed “Romney
roadmap” leaves Ryan's plan as the only place where anyone can find any
details. As an ABC News “fact-check”
put it,
“the Romney campaign says it has an even newer plan...[but] there are
no long-term reviews for this updated Romney-Ryan plan yet — or specific
published details – so it appears the 2011 CBO report on Ryan’s
original budget proposal is the only thing we have to go on.”
The
Romney campaign will surely complain that looking at Ryan's roadmap is
terribly unfair, but just as claims about his tax returns can be cleared
up by releasing them, all the campaign has to do is offer some of its
own specifics, which is something that Romney insists he won't do.
The
bigger problem is how this hide-and-seek strategy reinforces the
narratives that the Obama campaign has been advancing about their
opponent. Elections tend to feature "meta-narratives," and when team
Romney appear all over the map like this, it only advances the
perception that their candidate is easily swayed by his hard-right base,
has no core values and will say whatever you want to hear in order to
get elected. And his refusal to release any details of his own plan is
not likely to play well with the
63 percent
of voters who think he should release more tax returns – it will only
strengthen the perception that he's got something to hide from the
American public.
6. Issue Ownership
In 1961, when Medicare was first proposed, Ronald Reagan issued
a stern warning,
sounding much like Rush Limbaugh does today. If Medicare were to pass,
he said, “the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other
federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known
it in this country until... one of these days we are going to spend our
sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it
once was like in America when men were free.”
It's a story that conservatives have told ever since. In 1995, Bob Dole, the GOP's 1996 presidental nominee,
bragged: “I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare ... because we knew it wouldn’t work in 1965.” And today, seemingly
every day, a conservative rails against the perfidy of “entitlements,” including Medicare.
Here's
why that's relevant. First, because that rhetoric has largely fallen on
deaf ears -- Americans like Medicare, and by a two to one margin
they say that it's worth the costs to maintain.
Second,
while, again, the Romney team is trying to obscure the issues by saying
that it's actually Obama who wants to “raid” Medicare, that's going to
be a heavy lift because of a concept known as “issue owership.”
Political scientist John Sides
explained why “this will be an uphill battle for the GOP.”
Democrats
are more trusted to handle the issue of Medicare. That is, they “own”
the issue... To cite some more recent data, a February GW Battleground
Poll found that 52% of respondents trusted Democrats to handle “Social
Security and Medicare,” while 43% trusted Republicans. A June 2011 poll
found that 47% of respondents had “more confidence” in the Democrats’
ability to handle Medicare, while 40% had more confidence in
Republicans.
Second, although perceptions of which party owns an
issue can change, they usually will not change during the short window
of a campaign. Take 1988 for example. In this election, Michael Dukakis
tried to emphasize national defense. George H.W. Bush emphasized jobs
and declared that he would be the “education president.” Both were
attempting to “trespass” on the other party’s territory. How’d that work
out for them?
Voters tended to attribute Bush’s slogans and
promises about education and jobs to Dukakis, and attribute Dukakis’s
promises about national defense to Bush. They relied on stereotypes of
issue ownership—“if someone wants to improve education, he must be a
Democrat”—rather than pay attention to the specific promises of Bush and
Dukakis.
In other words, if the Romney team does
manage to muddy the waters about who favors what, long-held perceptions
about which party has opposed Medicare since even before it became law
should give Democrats an edge.
Republicans have convinced
themselves that the opposite is true, and this is based largely on a
single data-point: Republicans ran ads in 2010 attacking Democrats for
“raiding” Medicare, and they won big in the midterms. But that's a
dubious claim because while those Medicare ads were part of the mix,
they ran their campaign against the healthcare law and on the difficult
economy, and they enjoyed a significant cash advantage. Since then,
Democrats managed to win a series of special elections for House seats
that they were expected to lose, and they did it running against Ryan's
roadmap.
7. Context: Mitt's 1% Tax Bill Problem
Similarly,
while we're talking about Medicare right now – and it will be a crucial
issue throughout the election season for older Americans – that debate
will ultimately be viewed through the lens of voters' larger perceptions
about the candidates, and those perceptions are in turn shaped by an
array of issues, from Romney's experience outsourcing jobs at Bain to
Ryan's
fringe views on abortion.
According to CBS' latest
poll,
“Sixty-four percent of all Americans, and 68% of independents, think
Romney favors the rich over the middle class.” Only 18 percent say the
same of Obama.
And that brings us to what may be the most
significant number in the entire debate over Ryan's roadmap: if Ryan's
plan were the law of the land, then according to the only tax return
Mitt Romney has released (for 2010), Romney, sitting on a fortune
estimated at over $200 million,
would have paid an effective tax rate of just 0.82 percent. That's less than a tenth of the sales tax charged in New York City.
And
embracing a plan that gives you that kind of whopping cut makes it
awfully tough to argue that you're just looking out for grandma's best
interests.
