Elections & Political Parties

This isn’t the Etch a Sketch we were expecting. When summer began, conventional wisdom held that Mitt Romney would reinvent (or perhaps, re-reinvent) himself by abandoning the hard-edged cultural views he had adopted during the primaries and reach out to women and Hispanics. Instead, as the summer comes to a close and the Republican National Convention gets underway, it’s increasingly clear that he’s doing the opposite. Call it the bubba strategy.

TYPICALLY AT this point on the political calendar, a sitting vice president scrupulously downplays his interest in ascending to the top job. The thought of course consumes him, but actually discussing it strikes him as breathtakingly gauche. Vice presidents as varied as Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, and Al Gore all gamely hewed to this script.

Here’s what Mitt Romney will almost certainly talk about in his acceptance speech this week in Tampa: his experience in business, his experience running the Olympics, the number of Americans out of work, Obamacare, his beautiful wife, his beautiful family, his faith in America, his faith in faith, the national debt.

Here are some of the things Romney likely won’t talk about, but should, because they’ll help define his presidency whether he likes it or not:

We don't often weigh in on electoral politcs here on New Health Dialogue, but the introduction of Paul Ryan into the race as Mitt Romney's running mate has distinctly shifted the focus of the debate onto Medicare, at least for the moment, and the editor of Delve Into '12, the New America campaign blog, asked for our thoughts.

You should definitely check out the full post (here) and the rest of their campaign commentary, but if you're short on time, here's an excerpt from the end of our post:

[...T]he Ryan budget slashes government healthcare spending, but it does relatively little to reduce total health spending. (In fact, if Ryan’s plan was implemented, it could reduce Medicare’s bargaining power and actually increase total spending.) While the ACA includes specific programs aimed at reducing waste (for instance by giving doctors incentives to reduce spending on ineffective treatments, funding research on which treatments actually benefit patients, and making it easier for cheaper generic drugs to get approved), the Ryan plan’s main savings mechanism is competition among private insurers. In theory, giving people a choice of insurer should reduce healthcare spending –people will choose plans that offer  better value, forcing inefficient plans out of the market. But competition among private insurers has failed to control spending in the private insurance market for decades, so some skepticism of its ability to rein in spending on the elderly is warranted. If that doesn’t actually work and total medical spending doesn’t go down, the Ryan budget saves money by shifting spending from the federal government to individuals.

Ultimately, the Ryan budget's laser-like focus on reducing the federal deficit has led to a glaring oversight in the proposal’s healthcare component. Policy should be focused on reducing total healthcare spending, including private insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments, not just on reducing what the federal government spends. Healthcare spending has become a drag on the economy, accounting for up to two percentage points of unemployment—and that drag isn’t dependent on whether it’s funded by the government or the private sector. That’s the much more important challenge, and the Ryan budget ignores it completely.

Enjoy the weekend!

Jason Peuquet from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget on the budget bonafides of GOP VP candidate Paul Ryan and Brian Duggan from the Open Technology Institute on the massive digital takedown of Wired's Mat Honan. 

By choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney has sent out many messages, one of which is that foreign policy will not be a prominent (or, if he can help it, even a visible) element of his campaign. The few statements that Romney has made have been collages of sheer ignorance: His attacks on President Obama's New START treaty with Russia, for instance, amount to the most ill-informed articles on arms control that I've read in 40 years of following the nuclear debate.

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- A group of former U.S. military and intelligence officers, including retired Navy SEALs, appear in a 22-minute documentary that was released on Wednesday asserting that the Obama administration has leaked considerable classified intelligence about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden for political gain.

Maybe Mitt Romney should have saved the airfare. Sure, July’s Israel trip helped him with his Jewish donors and perhaps with some Christian evangelicals. But if it bought him any good will among Jewish voters, he’s just given it back—and then some—by selecting Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate.

On Saturday at his unveiling as the Republican vice presidential candidate, Congressman Paul Ryan had to do what the man heading up the ticket has seemed so reluctant to do: talk up Mitt Romney’s résumé. Ryan perfunctorily checked off the highlights—Bain, Salt Lake City Olympics, governorship of Massachusetts—but he didn’t dwell long on his new boss’ life story. It was novel enough to have Romney’s résumé make it into the pitch at all.

Why did Mitt Romney choose Paul Ryan? Movies. In action movies, the climactic scene often goes something like this: The bad guys have captured the hero. He’s bound and gagged thousands of miles from civilization as the final minutes tick away until the detonation of the super-thermo-subatomic death ray that will kill both him and half of humanity. In desperation, he hatches a wildly improbable escape plan, mutters to himself, “This is just crazy enough to work,” and saves the planet.