Northwest Indiana Discussion

Fact Checking Obama's Campaign Ad
About Romney's Proposal
for Medicare Reform
Forbes, by Avik Roy

“You can’t just make stuff up,” Barack Obama said last week. “That’s something that you learn as President.” But in the two weeks since Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate, President Obama has misleadingly defended his health law’s $716 billion in cuts to Medicare over the next decade. And on Saturday, the Obama campaign came out with a new ad, approved by the President, claiming that Mitt Romney’s Medicare plan could require seniors to pay $6,400 more a year for health insurance. That claim is not only false, but brazenly and incontrovertibly so. Indeed, almost everything in the ad is wrong except for the phrase “I’m Barack Obama, and I approved this message.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2012/0 ... re-reform/

This is the campaign version of Obama’s entire economic argument: he can’t fix the economy unless he spends more money. And unless we give him more money, he can’t spend it. So if the economy fails, it’s our fault.
Here’s the perverse logic:
Last week, when I was in Iowa, voters told me they were feeling it. The numbers back it up: Our side is getting outspent 2-to-1 on the air there.

But the folks asking me about this don't want an explanation -- they want to know what I'm going to do about it.

And the fact is that solving this problem is up to you ….

We're losing this air war right now.

I don't have as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008, so this whole thing is riding on you making it happen.

Perhaps the most laughable aspect of this latest desperate missive is Obama’s assertion that he doesn’t have “as much time to campaign this time as I did in 2008.” He’s done nothing but campaign since the beginning of the year. From January to mid-June, Obama held more than 160 fundraisers. During that same period in 2004, President George W. Bush had held just 79 fundraisers.
Here’s the sad fact for Obama: nobody’s enamored with him anymore. His spendthrift ways haven’t just bankrupted the country – they’ve bankrupted his campaign. And he still blames everyone else.