President Obama delivered a full-throated attack on Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget Tuesday. He also emptied out his DVR.
There’s been some debate over whether the GOP nominee will be able to move past the long and brutal Republican primary and get a fresh start in the general election. Obama made it clear during his speech to the Associated Press that the Republican standard bearer isn’t wiping the slate clean on his watch.
While the president hasn’t weighed in much on the primaries to this point, he’s clearly paid close attention. “I’m thinking about just running [the GOP debates] as advertisements,” he joked last month. On Tuesday, he made good on that promise, re-hashing some of the Republican fight’s greatest hits in his speech as evidence of his opponents’ priorities.
Here’s a rundown of the shout-outs Obama gave to the GOP primary cycle in his speech:
⢠Raise Your Hand If You Hate Compromise At a debate in August 2011, the GOP candidates were asked whether they would accept a budget deal with Democrats that included $10 in spending cuts to every $1 in new revenue. Digging in their anti-tax heels, every candidate on stage — including likely nominee Mitt Romney — promised to walk away.
In his speech Tuesday, Obama dug up the nine-month-old moment.
The challenge we have right now is that we have on one side, a party that will brook no compromise. And this is not just my assertion. We had presidential candidates who stood on a stage and were asked, “Would you accept a budget package, a deficit reduction plan, that involved $10 of cuts for every dollar in revenue increases?” Ten-to-one ratio of spending cuts to revenue. Not one of them raised their hand.
⢠My Social Engineering Quote Will Not Be A Campaign Issue Before he was a frontrunner-turned-also-ran, Newt Gingrich was the guy with the worst campaign rollout in recent history. Shortly after declaring his intention to seek his party’s nomination, Gingrich stepped on his party’s brand new House budget plan, calling it “right-wing social engineering.” The base went nuts, accusing Gingrich of doing Democrats’ job for them.
Gingrich begged for forgiveness soon after. “Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate,” he said shortly after he dropped the engineering line.
Looks like Gingrich’s plan didn’t work. From Obama’s speech:
Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal. (Laughter.) In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget “radical” and said it would contribute to “right-wing social engineering.” This is coming from Newt Gingrich.
⢠Everybody Loves A Mandate Romney’s remaining Republican rivals insist that Obama will dominate the debate over health care in the general election by tying his reform law — especially its use of an individual mandate — to Romney’s similar reforms in Massachusetts. A super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich even ran an ad depicting a hypothetical match-up between Romney and Obama in which the president runs rings around his opponent using precisely that argument.
The jury’s out on whether Romney will be able to deflect these attacks, but Gingrich and Santorum were correct to suggest the White House is eager to trot them out. Obama is increasingly citing Romney’s support for the mandate in his public statements. In an interview with Marketplace last month, he said Democrats “designed a program that actually previously had support of Republicans — including the person who may end up being the Republican standard bearer and is now pretending like he came up with something different.”
Obama, brought the issue up again in his speech to make a similar point.
Health care, which is in the news right now — there’s a reason why there’s a little bit of confusion in the Republican primary about health care and the individual mandate since it originated as a conservative idea to preserve the private marketplace in health care while still assuring that everybody got covered, in contrast to a single-payer plan. Now, suddenly, this is some socialist overreach.
The team over at American Bridge, the official opposition research TiVo of Democrats this cycle, says it is taking pains to ensure Republicans’ primary slip-ups come back to haunt them.
“It’s the Etch-A-Sketch. That is what they believe,” said Rodell Mollineau, head of American Bridge. “In many ways it’s a very cynical belief by Republicans that you can do whatever you want in the primaries because the general election voters aren’t really watching, the independents aren’t really watching. And then the day after you can just shake it all up and it will all go away.”
The long primary has made it tougher for Republicans to pull it off this time, Mollineau said. “We are going to have video archive that proves these Republicans are talking out of both sides of their mouth,” he said.
