A lesson learned the hard way after weeks and weeks of anti-Bain attacks: If you’re not playing offense, you’re playing defense. And Mitt can’t afford to play defense on an issue as toxic as Medicare. As Rick Wilson put it, “The more we’re up in their grill, the less they can lie and demagogue.”
Looks like this will be part of a sustained, and welcome, push to neutralize the Democrats’ entitlements scaremongering. We don’t have to “win” this argument, exactly; a mere stalemate would demoralize the left given their eagerness to demagogue the issue. But winning would be nice. Romney, on the stump today in Ohio:
“There’s another promise he made. You know that every time you get a paycheck you see there’s a deduction there. It’s going to Medicare. It’s going into a trust account to make sure that when you retire, that there’s a health program there that will care for you. One of the things the President did which I find extraordinary, something he never mentioned when he was running for office. You see, when he ran for office, he said he’d protect Medicare. But did you know that he’s taken $716 billion out of the Medicare trust fund. He’s raided that trust fund. And you know what he did with it? He’s used it to pay for Obamacare, a risky, unproven federal government takeover of health care. And if I’m President of the United States, we’re putting the $716 billion back.”