Paul Ryan had a rally in Florida and we had one in Ohio, so I thought I’d compare the two:
Republican vice presidential candidate Paul D. Ryan’s initial campaign visit to Florida, site of this month’s Republican nominating convention, was to The Villages, a hotbed of Republican retirees. Residents were encouraged to arrive in their golf carts for the outdoor rally Saturday.
Hundreds of supporters jammed one of the development’s “town squares,” where free entertainment and boozy dances each night have helped this community of 60,000 seniors earn a somewhat double-edged reputation as Disney World for the Cialis set. Romney counts billionaire H. Gary Morse, who built The Villages on more than 30 square miles of central Florida farmland, among his campaign’s biggest donors.
First, the standard disclaimers. My attempts at punditry are purely anecdotal. This is one county in rural Ohio. I’m a partisan advocate, not a journalist, and I’m not a political professional.
We rent a pavilion (a concrete pad with a roof) at the fairgrounds and serve a meal and then we have speakers. A part-time disc jockey has become active within our county group over the past year, and his music really adds so much to these events. There was a wedding reception going on in another building at the fairgrounds and the guests were wandering over to our event because the music was better. Our local OFA organizer immediately approached the wedding reception guests who crashed our political event and made his pitch, which made me laugh. Leave no stone unturned there, Nathan! Seeing Nathan earnestly speaking with young men in ill-fitting, rented tuxedos who really just wanted to sit at our picnic tables and smoke cigarettes and listen to music was very amusing to me.
I like to think I’m a good host, so during the meal I try to talk to every person who comes out. I know and like most of them, so this isn’t a chore, and we’re talking about 40 people, not thousands. Ordinarily I would try to speak to anyone who comes individually and then my only role at the microphone is to tell them about upcoming events, housekeeping type stuff, but after the conversations I had during the meal I did the upcoming events and then I did a 5 minute factual presentation on the Romney-Ryan plan for Medicare and Medicaid.
There are two reasons I did that. First, I heard over and over that people are tired of the political ads. I had one woman who is my neighbor and one of the kindest people I know tell me “I love the President, but first I turned off the GOP ads and now I turn off his ads, too.” We in Ohio have been hit with political ads almost continually since 2009. Sherrod Brown ALONE has had 12 milllion dollars in negative ads thrown at him. So, we may be reaching the point of diminishing returns in political ads.
The second reason I did a straight-arrow factual bit on the Romney-Ryan plan for Medicare is the people at this rally were not hooting and hollering like the folks in The Villages. The median income in this county is 42k, and they are taking this election very seriously. There was a gravity and focus I felt talking to people that was not there prior to Paul Ryan’s entry into the race. No more jokes about Seamus on top of the car or dancing horses. They want to know what happens to them if Romney-Ryan prevail. So I told them. I told them Romney-Ryan plan to replace Medicare with vouchers. I told them I know “Medicare” isn’t a voucher and they know it too, because they DO know it, despite the elaborate rationalizations and lawyerly parsing of language that apparently makes it impossible for political media to write a simple factual statement like “vouchers aren’t Medicare.”
I told them Romney-Ryan also plan to drastically reduce Medicaid coverage which means that when Mitt Romney says that “nothing changes” for the people who get Medicare now he must be talking about the people who live in the Villages because a lot of elderly rely on BOTH Medicare and Medicaid. They are what are known as “dual enrollees.” People know this, here, but I told them again, because Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to continue to say that “nothing changes” for current Medicare recipients and that’s not true. Medicare and Medicaid are connected. Romney-Ryan have chosen to ignore this although hopefully Paul Ryan, alleged “policy wonk”, is aware of it. I believe that’s known as an omission, Mr. Ryan, and a knowing omission is as deliberately deceptive as a flat-out lie.
The factual bit on Romney-Ryan Medicare/Medicaid was well received, so we’re going to expand it a little. We have county fairs here. Democrats and Republicans rent booths on the fairway. Two fairs are coming up, one in my county and one in a county east of mine. We’re going to do Medicare-Medicaid Romney-Ryan information nights and advertise those nights as such, because people really seem hungry for some actual information delivered by a real live human being, face to face.
Baud
I don’t know why The Villages are getting so much play in the press this year. It’s not as if they are representative of any group except staunch Republicans.
NancyDarling
Kay, what’s the best source of materials if one wanted to do a Medicare/Medicaid Romney/Ryan information night in their own town?
Mino
Smart approach. Low key and business-like. Folks will retain that information and pass it along.
I do want to hear more “human shield” snark from the press, however.
Jewish Steel
So, maybe the savvy move is to roll out 30 sec spots of kittens playing?
I’m Barack Obama and I approve these kittens.
Kay
@NancyDarling:
You can pull from this post, the NYTimes editorial is good on the Romney-Ryan lies on Obama and Medicare, and the Kaiser stuff on dual enrollees, and you can add this, which is a congressional Dem analysis of Ryan Plan from 2011. It’s nice because you can pull out your congressional district, but it’s 2011, so if you were redistricted, the population numbers probably changed.
We did the 5 minutes and then we got swamped with individual questions, which I think is good. This is a politically savvy group, they know a lot already, they’re like “I saw on C-SPAN…” so the county fair crowd will be harder :)
JPL
@NancyDarling: Someone told me that AARP is doing a good job analyzing the two plans. The Washington Post also did a side by side comparison.. link
Pillsy
@Baud:
They’re getting a lot of attention because the members of the press corps who aren’t totally in the tank for Paul Ryan and his granny-starving ways are terrified that Obama will open up a big lead and ruin their plans to get highg ratings and/or page views before November.
Kay
@Jewish Steel:
One thing that was interesting is that it really bothers people when they don’t know who is paying for the ad. I was surprised by that. Obama doesn’t have as many outside groups as ‘ol moneybags, so they keep seeing “I’m Barack Obama and I approved this message” and then some shady Romney-type ad by God knows who. Also, they should give up on attacking Sherrod Brown. It has become a joke. It is SIX MONTHS of mysterious donor ads attacking Sherrod Brown. If they were going to demonize Sherrod Brown, I think it would have stuck by now. Good Lord. It’s like the Sherrod Brown Show.
Southern Beale
Someone on Twitter posted a photo of an airplane that circled above the Paul Ryan event trailing a banner reading “Paul Ryan Keep Your Hands Off Our Medicare”
LOL
quannlace
I keep thinking of that ’60’s Brit drama, ‘The Prisoner.’ with Patrick McGoohan. But in this particular Village, who’s No. 2 ?
Ash Can
@Kay:
I know what you’re getting at, but I disagree with your phrasing. I’d much rather they blew their cash on lost causes than simply stashing it in an overseas tax-dodge account or spending it on ads in a race where it could make a difference.
Valdivia
@Kay:
I think at this point Obama would do well to pull his ads for a week or two (not now but at some point after the conventions) so that all that people experience is the noise from the R’s trying to buy the election. And him making a point of it on the trail. Look, they are trying to buy the election, you don’t even know who paid for the ad. ETA–Also make up a name of an outrageous PAC and say it could be them for all you know.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Kay: Well it’s not like they can actually run an ad for Josh Mandel. That mendacious little weasel can turn people off faster than the Romneybot. Did you see the Plunderbund piece about the Beallsville rally, where he tried to sound like an aw shucks down home guy? It’s got video too.
Thanks both for the post and for all the hard work you do getting the word out. Hearing factual presentations from real people can be quite effective as there isn’t the impression of an axe to grind or hearing from a paid shill.
beltane
A few years ago I read that The Villages has the highest rates of STDs in the entire state of Florida. All these horny old Republicans hopped up on hate and pills and copulating with each other like a bunch of baboons in golf pants sounds like a vision of hell worthy of Hieronymus Bosch.
Kay
@Southern Beale:
Reading the article, though, there’s a Romney voter who says they’ll never actually cut Medicare, so he’s safe to vote for Romney. I just think this is an attitude on the Right. It’s more than “I’ve got mine, screw you.” It’s this delusional notion that they can have EVERYTHING they want. Medicare AND giant tax cuts! Cake AND ice cream! This to me seems the polar opposite of “responsible.” It’s the thinking of kindergarteners.
Redshift
I had a really good day of canvassing here in NoVA yesterday, but there was one door where we really earned our “pay.” We talked to a woman who was definitely a potential supporter, but was very unhappy with all the negative ads (we’re blanketed with them here, too, of course.) She really wanted to see positive plans for the economy, for manufacturing, and not just vague generalities.
I think we did quite well just by listening respectfully (it was hard to get in a word edgewise, and I didn’t want to interrupt.) We agreed that we also turn off all the ads. I talked about the auto rescue, and that manufacturing in the US is up for the first time in decades. We had literature that was about positive plans and accomplishments.
We also took copious notes, which the campaign is asking us to do, and I believe they will make use of them. I think we’ll get this family’s votes, through individualized effort. But it’s also worth noting that these are the kind of voters the Rove attack ads are trying to turn off. In the absence of the vote-suppression environment, it wouldn’t require a lot of effort to get them out to vote for us.
Kay
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Is it true he didn’t take the bar exam? People keep telling me that, and I refuse to research him. It’s fine if he didn’t take the bar exam, but it has drawn comment here, like he was afraid he’d fail.
Kay
@Redshift:
It’s a great story, and so true of canvassing. People tell me “I’m not a good talker” and I tell them they’re not going to be doing much talking, they’re going to be listening.
LanceThruster
I think it was someone in here who suggested replacing the term vouchers with coupons as it conveys the uncertainty of what it will provide in any healthcare transaction.
Future patients would fare about as well as Gil from the Simpsons does.
jwb
Kay, this is an excellent post as usual, and it always gives me so much hope when I hear about the work of local organizers. Also, you are a great story teller.
Spaghetti Lee
@Baud:
Hey, what could be more Real Everyday American than a planned gated community only open to people over 50?
JGabriel
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LA Times:
Out of 60,000 residents, Ryan only got a few hundred? In one of the GOP’s key demographics, old white people?
Despite the neutral-positive coverage, that number is not a good sign for them.
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Zach
If everyone in the country knew these three things, Obama would win by over 10 points:
1. Medicaid pays for long term care for millions of elderly people as well as poor children and their parents.
2. Romney has promised to cut Medicaid spending by 100 to 200 million dollars per year right now and much more in the future. That’s several thousand dollars per person.
3. Romney has promised to give almost all of that money to the wealthy – tax cuts of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for millionaires.
If I were running Obama’s campaign the part of my communications that dealt with policy contrast would consist only of repeating those three things over and over. Running against how Ryan’s budget treats Medicare seems like a good idea but it’s too confusing to explain on TV. Romneys helpfully said outright that he’ll cut over a hundred billion a year from Medicaid and give out about the same in tax cuts to the rich. The message should be: “Romney thinks the biggest problem with America is that the poor and elderly have too much healthcare and the rich have too little money. Do you agree?”
JGabriel
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LanceThruster:
I’ve been doing that for about a year or two now, at least.
Another important language rule should be: Always call them Voter Suppression laws, not Voter ID.
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Redshift
@Kay:
That is interesting. There was a great line from commenter gian here which could be useful.
“Why are all Karl Rove’s groups called Crossroads? Because that’s where you go to make a deal with the devil.”
Baud
@Kay:
I’m not a good listener either. I’d be all “Fuck you if your not voting Democratic.”
Zach
Also The Villages are pretty wealthy but there are still a ton of Doctors there accepting Medicaid. I really think that the typical elected official in the GOP has no clue that even quite wealthy people benefit from Medicaid by not having to take care of parents suffering dementia, etc. Nor do they have any clue the extent to which millions of Americans actively fear burdening their children in this way. Social welfare for the elderly probably frees up trillions in assets in this country that are invested rather than stuffed under the bed because people know that if everything goes belly up they still won’t have to burden their children when they can no longer take care of themselves.
Yutsano
@Zach: Yesbut…Willard will protect teh bebehs and keep teh ghey from marrying and spreading their homoseckual agenda. Also, Willard isn’t a sekrit MuslimcommunoKenyanfascist like that other boy is. Tribalism can be very hard to overcome.
Jewish Steel
@Kay: Easy for me to say in Obama safe IL, and with no Senate races this year, but I hope those shady donors spend themselves into oblivion.
Ben Franklin
@beltane:
That’s the social cost of Spring Break.
The Turistas don’t just bring bucks.
Kay
@Baud:
hah!
Well, I’m cheap so I don’t donate money so we’re probably even. I give like 25 dollars. Maybe. John had to shame me into buying a Balloon Juice calendar for pet charity. I HAVE a calendar. Why in the world would I want TWO? That’s Romney-level excess, in my view :)
Kay
@Jewish Steel:
I said the same thing until Martin showed me how much money Sheldon Adelson has. Sheldon Adelson can buy Ohio, basically. This is not going to break him.
cmorenc
@JGabriel:
The rally probably conflicted with the regular tee-time of a large portion of the potential crowd. Senior golf-aholics wouldn’t miss their tee time for anyone but their grand-daughter’s wedding up North somewhere.
Redshift
@JGabriel: Reminds me of the NPR story on the contrasts between the two campaigns which noted that Obama campaign events draw thousands, and Romney’s more often draw a few hundred.
And yet we keep getting stories about polling showing Republican voters are more energized. Hmmm.
Redshift
@Baud: If you’re somewhere with a campaign office, there actually are campaign tasks where you don’t have to talk to the stupid American electorate, either in person or on the phone. ;-)
julie
Rep Marcy Kaptur just sent out literature to her 9th District constituents geared towards seniors answering Medicare questions and debunking some Medicare myths. I hope all Dems across the country do this. Seniors do look forward to their mail and read it.
max
I had one woman who is my neighbor and one of the kindest people I know tell me “I love the President, but first I turned off the GOP ads and now I turn off his ads, too.”
Well, that’s what I try to do, but if the evening local news is on and I’m in the kitchen trying to cook, I have to settle for ‘Fuck you Rove, you lying sack of shit!’ Doesn’t make a lick of difference, but I certainly feel better.
So, we may be reaching the point of diminishing returns in political ads.
Yeah! Everyone was running around complaining that the R’s were going to spend umpty-zillion in ads back in May (and other times). Having seen the Crossroads ads approximately 47 billion times, I can say that I don’t see much effect to them. (Something to do with the narrator being a woman claiming to have voted for Obama because he talked so purty. Very few people (pundits excluded) vote on the basis of the quality of delivery of oratory. Content usually has *something* to do with it. But trying to swing an Obama voter on the basis that Karl Rove is very sympathetic to her stupidity is not a message that’s going to resonate. (And as near as I can tell it didn’t.) It resonated with the people who already believed that anyways. They saw it on the teleprompter.
R’s talking big about how much money they’re going to spend prior to actually spending it is just meta-campaigning. Popular inside the Beltway and going nowhere outside it.
We’re in good shape, here. (Considering we’re in the middle of non-shooting Civil War.)
Jewish Steel: So, maybe the savvy move is to roll out 30 sec spots of kittens playing?
Make it a full sixty seconds! Just to make it a political ad, you could ad a scroller: ‘The Democratic Party is deeply intimidated by Karl Rove and his amazing campaign skills. We’re terrified. Really. Promise. Just like you heard it on Fox News. Really. Oh, BTW, reading this is just like using a teleprompter like Mitt Romney uses. Anyways, have a nice day!’
The foam that would produce could do the entire Third World’s laundry for a week.
Medicare AND giant tax cuts! Cake AND ice cream! This to me seems the polar opposite of “responsible.” It’s the thinking of kindergarteners.
Well, yeah. MORE MONEY FOR ME ME ME! Prosperity gospel is popular for a reason, it just doesn’t happen to be a nice one.
max
[‘I appreciate your posts, BTW. In case nobody had mentioned that recently.’]
smintheus
Do you tell them that Ryan also proposes to close down all the VA hospitals and turn veterans’ care into vouchers as well? I find that people are if anything more stunned by the audacity of that because Republicans haven’t spent years directing their propaganda at convincing the public that the VA system is about to go bankrupt.
Jewish Steel
@Kay: If Anderson* buys Ohio, you can move to my ‘hood and help us get rid of Aaron Schock. I was appalled to find I’ve been gerrymandered into his district. No Ds running against him either.
*Adelson. Duh.
LanceThruster
@JGabriel:
Thanks for making clear the attribution. It is well deserved. You are absolutely spot on re: voter suppression as well.
beltane
@Redshift: Insane people are often more energized than sane people. We think of Romney/Ryan as ethics-free hacks who would betray anyone and anything to make a buck. If we also thought they were hatched in a super-secret al-Qaida lab in the desert as part of a plan to kill us all in our sleep with their supernatural powers, then maybe we could hope to be as energized as the Republicans.
SenyorDave
Your narrative would be a GREAT ad for the Obama campaign. Remind people that elections have consequences, and if R/R wins, Medicare and SS have a significant chance of not exiting in any meaningful form in the not-too-distant future.
red dog
Do all these rich Jewish PAC founders think Mittens will tell them to attack Iran and other Israeli enemies or somehow protect the motherland most of them have never lived in???
? Martin
OT, but that “You can’t get pregnant if you’re raped” position is all kinds of awesome. Please let the GOP embrace that – particularly Ryan.
Kay
@? Martin:
The GOP think they have a problem with middle aged women, and they do. But they have a bigger problem with younger women, who have not heard this sort of rhetoric in their entire lives and are completely side-swiped by it. My daughter was shocked when the GOP House went full-time contraception/abortion. Her entire political adulthood and awareness was The Time Of Pelosi. She said “what is GOING ON?” She had never heard it before.
Baud
@Redshift:
I’m already on it.
gogol's wife
@Redshift:
I assumed that was intentional on his part. It was in the fine print of the contract!
WaterGirl
@? Martin: I seem to have missed the: “You can’t get pregnant if you’re raped” thing. What is that about?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Redshift: Was that the same report that interviewed a woman at a Florida rally? I almost drove off the road when she said she wasn’t worried about R&R cutting SS and Medicare because she had raised her children right. She was confident her children would see that sh e was taken care of.
In more pleasant news, there is an anti-domestic violence ad running during the preseason games. I happened to look up at the TV just as Joe Biden took his turn before the camera, followed by Obama wrapping it up.
JoyfulA
@WaterGirl: We had a PA state senator from Delaware County a few decades back who insisted rape never resulted in pregnancy. It made a big splash in the press and was refuted loudly by gynecologists, victims, historians, etc.
Don’t tell me this malarkey is coming back.
RedKitten
That’s the thing: according to Wiki, Republicans outnumber Dems 2-1 down there. But there are also an AWFUL lot of snowbirds who live down there for part of the year as well. They may be right-leaning, but they can’t vote.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
NO ONE spends one hundred million dollars casually, not even Adelson. In fact, anyone willing to spend one hundred million dollars is likely so crazy they can’t deal with not getting their way. When Obama wins reelection, Adelson like a lot of other major Republican figures is likely to have an aneurism. McConnell and the Kochs will be interesting to watch as well.
Mnemosyne
@WaterGirl:
It’s an old, old myth about pregnancy that dates back well before the Victorians decided women don’t like sex. Basically, the theory was that a woman’s orgasm was the equivalent of a man’s ejaculation and was equally required for pregnancy, so if a woman claimed she got pregnant after being raped, that was “proof” that it wasn’t really rape.
The people who spout it now don’t remember its origins, but that’s where it comes from. No pun intended.
catclub
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Version 1: Be nice to your kids because they will pick your nursing home.
Version 2: Be nice to your kids because they will pick your ice floe.
WaterGirl
@JoyfulA: @Mnemosyne: Wow. Just wow.
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: I had missed Cole’s post about the idiot in Missouri. Martin’s comment makes sense to me now.
JGabriel
@LanceThruster:
Oh, I’m not claiming provenance. Just that we’ve been using it here for a while. It’s such a natural substition I’m not sure anyone could claim they came up with it first.
I think coupons over vouchers dates back to the Clinton or Reagan era, whenever Republicans first proposed HC coupons.
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LevelB
I’m thinking that the Republican plan is to change the name of the Department of Defense to Medicare. Then they will have truly saved Medicare, get massive bipartisan support for the program, etc. And best of all, the fact checkers can award loads of fiery noses to democrats who demagogue the destruction of the safety net – just look at the budget numbers!
Total win.