Mitt Romney and his albatross.
Paul Ryan might have been Mitt Romney's capitulation to the far Right to get them off his back and on board his campaign, which coincidentally makes Ryan an awfully good lightning rod for the Obama campaign. As Greg Sargent
explains, there's just so much there to run against. Here are the Obama campaign's latest swing state radio ads:
* The ad in Florida will emphasize Ryan’s plan to quasi-voucherize Medicare.
* The ad in Iowa will emphasize cuts in Ryan’s budget to clean energy investments, which are meant to remind voters of the GOP stance on wind energy, an important issue in the state.
* The ad in Virginia will emphasize the Ryan budget’s cuts to infrastructure investments.
* The ads in Ohio and New Hampshire emphasize the Ryan budget’s cuts to Pell grants, making it harder for kids in those states to go to college.
And so on; all of the ads, meanwhile, will also stress that the Ryan plan would result in deep tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.
Stressing that these cuts will be accompanied by massive tax breaks for the very rich is the key point of the messaging, working on erasing any advantage Romney/Ryan might have on the economy. All of these extreme cuts to domestic spending are, on the one hand, intended to shrink government until it's completely crippled. But even more so, those cuts allow Republicans to massively cut taxes for the very rich, people like Mitt Romney.
That's something easy for the voting public to understand, since Mitt Romney's taxes continue to be such a quagmire for the richer-than-God candidate. But the tie-in between those tax cuts for the rich and the fact that they'll be made at the expense of middle-class, working families is the key. It might be hard for voters to actually believe that a politician would take such crazy, extreme positions all for the sake of tax cuts for the rich, but the more they hear it, the more they'll believe it.