Ending Medicare as we know it may be the best-known part of the Romney-Ryan plan, but there's so much more there that people will just hate as they learn about it. That gives the Obama campaign the chance to peel off a piece at a time to let people know about it, a new set of Republican policies to hate practically every week between now and the election. Up now:
education, particularly college aid.
On Tuesday, Obama planned to tell voters in sharply contested Ohio that Ryan's budget proposal would cut $115 billion from the Education Department, remove 2 million children from Head Start programs and cost 1 million college students their Pell Grants over the next decade. The line of criticism will be coupled with television ads.
A
radio ad running in Ohio says that Ryan's budget "could cut Pell Grants for up to 356,000 Ohio students." And in his planned remarks at a Columbus, Ohio, event Tuesday, Obama says:
That’s his answer for a young person hoping to go to college—shop around, borrow money from your parents if you have to—but if they don’t have it, you’re on your own.
That’s not an answer. There is nothing a parent wants more than to give our kids opportunities we never had. And there are few things as painful as not being able to do that. But right now, as we’re still fighting our way back from the worst economic crisis in most of our lifetimes, many parents are struggling just to make ends meet. And I do not accept the notion that we should deny their children the opportunity of a higher education and a brighter future just because their families were hit hard by the recession.
The Romney campaign's response is that college costs have increased under President Obama, which is one of those charges that's true as far as it goes—except that the president does not set tuition levels, and Romney's charges depend on no one looking at his record in Massachusetts. Romney
likes to tout a program in Massachusetts that gave free tuition at state universities for high-scoring high school students.
There was only one problem: due to the structure of university costs in Massachusetts, free tuition meant little because non-tuition fees are egregiously high. For example, the scholarship covered only 7 percent of total costs at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, according to the Boston Globe. And while tuition leveled out, other college costs grew by 63 percent during Romney's tenure.
So those charges about Obama making college less affordable might be convincing as long as no one looks at Romney's past record or his plans for the future, or notices that Obama has
added $40 billion in Pell Grants along with other initiatives to make college more affordable.