Obamacare replaces Medicare with something else, the Ryan plan just guts it with a flat rate subsidy
...which is replacing it with something else. Seeing as how Medicare
is essentially a subsidy, I don't understand the logic in saying that replacing it with a different type of subsidy is a gutting, whereas ObamaCare is not.
There simply is no defense on this point. The Democratic talking points on Medicare and the Ryan plan are blatantly and demonstrably hypocritical. And you know how politicians are always accusing each other of using "scare tactics"? Well, this is what it looks like when it actually happens.
which means Medicare in any form whatsoever disappears.
Even Democrats don't take this stance; they carefully phrase their accusations to say that Medicare "as we know it" will be gone.
That makes it a lot more scarier to voters. If it is national health care versus medicare voters prefer what they are used to, Medicare, because they are not crazy about change. But if the choice becomes national health plan versus the Ryan Plan, Ryan loses big time and takes Republicans with them because it is currently the plan they are endorsing and no Republican has articulated an alternative. It will not have a major impact on Senate races at this point because they have not embraced it, but the House is going to lose a lot of seats. I never said they would lose the House, but think they might, and would consider twenty-five seats to be a lot. I do think at the very least they will lose nineteen or twenty seats and that to me is a lot also because it will marginalize the Tea Party as that is where most of the losses will come from.
You can, of course, use whatever personal, highly nuanced definition of "a lot" that you like. But historically, what you're talking about is average losses.
As for alternatives to the Ryan plan: it was voted on just five weeks ago.
If Pawlenty actually articulates an alternative plan significantly different from the Ryan Plan he will piss off the Tea Party people.
Again: it was voted on a grand total of five weeks ago, so I'm not sure how you've come to believe that it's even had enough time to become part of Tea Party canon. I don't know how many Tea Partiers you know, or how representative of the whole you've decided they are, but it's not my experience that the Ryan plan represents a sacred cow for many of them.
I also think the idea that Pawlenty will "piss off the Tea Party people" is kind of bizarre. We both know any alternative he offers is still going to be heavy on free market principles and low on state control, and it's hard to imagine Tea Partiers being "pissed" about such a proposal.
That video you released looks like a negative campaign in the making when you he gets to specific proposals. "America is in serious trouble, a lot of personal sacrifices," etc. Reagan campaigned against a weak economy, he never said anything about personal sacrifices. He didn't talk about making "painful' decisions.
Well, first off, he said "tough" decisions. Second, it was followed with the obligatory uptick in music and hopeful talk about how we can overcome our problems. And third, you're taking what is essentially a sentence or two in one video and extrapolating an entire 18-month campaign out of it.
Sure, if he spends all his time on the campaign trail saying "everything sucks," he'll lose. He might lose even if he doesn't do this; most challengers do. But at this point there's no good reason to think he will. Every challenger has to walk that line between condemnation of current policies and optimism that they can be rolled back and the tide can be turned. Pawlenty is no different, and I see no reason to believe he's going to shirk the conventional wisdom on this front.
Watch that New York congressional district. If the Repub loses as is being predicted, it will be more of the same in House elections next year. The only reason she will lose is the Ryan Plan which she endorsed.
You've said this before, and it just isn't true. First, the Republican incumbent (Chris Lee) resigned in disgrace. Second, though Lee won handily in 2010, the percentage of the vote for Republicans before that in recent elections was far from resounding: 55%, 52%, 55%. And third -- and most importantly -- there's essentially nothing to suggest that the 26th district is some magical bellwether.
People said the exact same sort of thing about the special election in the 23rd; Republicans had held the seat for almost 20 years, lost it, and I heard any number of Democratic commenters use it to disabuse people of the notion that the '10 midterms would be painful for the Democratic party. I have specific memories of them wildly mocking conservatives who had talked about a "wave" election. Obviously, they couldn't have been more wrong. They were clinging to a positive result because they merely wanted it to be predictive of all the others.
The takeaway is that special elections are just that -- special. Single elections turn on many things, and there's simply no valid reason for ascribing one of them with a special predictive power at any point, let alone a
year and a half before the other elections.
I'm tempted to suggest that pretty much everything in your post that I disagree with stems from the same error: extrapolating and speculating based on precious little data. The Ryan plan is brand new, yet you've already declared it Tea Party canon and Republican gospel. Pawlenty has one sentence in a lone campaign video, and already he's apparently running a "negative" campaign. A Democrat might win in a special election in the 26th, and suddenly that's supposed to be indicative of a massive nationwide trend 18 months from now.
I know nobody likes to say they don't know things, but: we don't know these things. You, me, or anyone else. The fact that we have little information should not be used as an excuse to magnify the importance of what little information we have.