The escalating disaster that is Paul Ryan.

[DainBramaged]

The conventional wisdom on Obama’s recent surge is that it’s due largely to Mitt Romney’s 47% disaster, and there’s clearly something to this. If nothing else, it’s given Team Obama grist for an absolutely devastating ad.

But it’s worth pointing out another dynamic that’s been overlooked here: The escalating disaster that is Paul Ryan. At the time of his selection, a number of pundits argued Ryan’s strategic benefits, suggesting he would boost Romney by energizing conservatives, or by allowing Romney to run as the candidate of big ideas, or that he would at least be the party’s best defender of the Medicare plan Romney was going to have to defend whether he wanted to or not. This seemed like a stretch at the time—after all, Ryan’s Medicare plan proved to be a massive liability the one time voters weighed in on it. But who could say for sure?

Well, fast forward a month-and-a-half and the numbers look pretty persuasive. This week the New York Times released a set of polls, conducted by Quinnipiac, assessing the state of the race in Ohio and Florida. The top-line numbers were jaw-dropping enough: Obama’s lead in Ohio grew from six to ten over the last month, and from three to nine in Florida. (It’s better to focus on the change here than the magnitude, which is highly sensitive to polling methodology.) But once you look at the internal numbers, they’re even less kind to Romney. More to the point, they suggest Ryan has done enormous damage to the ticket.

Back in late August, Obama led Romney on the question of who would handle Medicare better by 8 points in Florida and 10 points in Ohio; now he’s up 15 in Florida and 16 in Ohio. And the problems are especially acute among senior citizens, a group Obama has traditionally struggled with. A month ago, Obama was down 13 points in Florida among people 65 and older; today he’s up 4. On the specific question of Medicare, Obama was down 4 points among Florida seniors in August; today he’s up 5 points. (The Quinnipiac Poll re-shuffled its age-groups between August and September, so you won’t be make apples-to-apples comparisons by eyeballing their crosstabs. But the super-kind people at Quinnipiac re-reshuffled them for me.)



http://www.tnr.com/blog/107829/47-was-bad-romney-ryan-has-been-deadly#



Kicked in the ass by his own party my my

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. Ryan anti billboard

[SunSeeker]

13. OMG. That one pegs it!

[TBF]

2. If I were the Obama team I'd be running TV ads about

Ryan wanting to do away with Social Security/Medicare in every swing state. I'd run them over & over - hell I'd buy advertising on FAUX news so they see them. Elderly folks vote and they do not want to lose their benefits.

[jsr]

3. Agreed.

The Obama campaign should make Ryan a prominent theme.

[Wounded Bear]

6. Not only that.....

The elderly also don't want those benefits taken away from their own children and grandchildren.

They don't fall for the old "You won't be affected" crap that RAyn tried to push. Current seniors under 80 years old or so have had SS/Medicare basically their whole lives, planned on them and worked and paid for them.

They want those programs to live longer than they will, and not as some coupon clipped from the Sunday supplement. They earned their benefits and they want their progeny to have the same opportunity to earn them.

It's why Bush crashed and burned on his SS privatization tour. It's why the RAyn plans are not selling in Poughkeepsie.

[DCKit]

16. I asked a retired friend of mine....

"How long do you think the rest of us are going to allow you to keep your Medicare benefits if we know it'll never be there for us? It won't exist if nobody is willing to pay into the program."

[porphyrian]

4. Paul Ryan says it's not his fault people don't understand Ayn Rand. n/t

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021369933

[the_chinuk]

11. OK. Who gets the blame for us understanding her?

[hollysmom]

5. I just doj't get why he has to lie about his athletics

3 lies now, come on, after he was caught on the first one, you would have thought he would have been bright enough to stop. But NOOOooOOOoo

[12AngryBorneoWildmen]

14. I know the Marathon Lie, but the other two?

[hollysmom]

15. they were

1) lying about his body fat - he named a number so low, he would be dead if it were true
2) climbing xx many mountain tops in Colorado, someone figured if he climbed that many he was pretty much doing nothing for a year when he claimed he was working.

[Vincardog]

7. Lyin Ryan taking a bad campaign and making it into a miserable one

[AnnaLee]

8. Check out Brad DeLong out for Sept 29

Follow the link to the audio of Paul Ryan advocating Ann Rand and the privatization of social programs into profit driven. Note the clever words e.g. not for profit but rather ownership, etc.

[link:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/09/paul-ryan-socialism-must-be-destroyed-and-by-socialism-i-mean-things-like-social-security-medicare-food-stamps-and-une.html#more|Paul Ryan: Socialism Must Be Destroyed, and by "Socialism" I Mean Things Like Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, and Unemployment Insurance
]

Paul Ryan:

Social Security right now is a collectivist system. It is a welfare transfer system…. And so what we have coming now at the beginning of this century is a fight…. [A]ll they have to do is to stop us from succeeding. Autopilot will get them to where they want to go. It will bring more government, more collectivism, more centralized government if we do not succeed in switching these programs and reforming these programs from what some people call a defined-benefit system to a defined-contribution system--and I am talking about health-care programs as well--from a third-party socialist-based system to an individually-prefunded individually-directed system. We can do this. We are on offense on a lot of these issues…

The audio gets funnier and funnier as it goes along. At one point he talks about the Dems using "victimhood" and looking down their noses at the working class.

[libodem]

9. Hot damn

Woo Hoo!!!

[FSogol]

10. LOL, McCain made a better choice than Romney.

[magical thyme]

12. Hmmm...Lyin' Ryan. Failin' Palin.

I'm starting to see a pattern here. History really does rhyme!