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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (54254)	8/15/2012 10:56:55 PM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

The Trouble with Joe The vice president is an embarrassment to the White House. (Actually Biden is an embarrassment to the entire country.) By John Fund August 15, 2012 12:30 P.M. The Obama campaign told the Hill on Tuesday that it “is confident Vice President Biden will be an effective foil” for Paul Ryan despite Biden’s latest gaffe. I’m not so sure, and neither are some Democrats. Biden’s rhetorical belly-flop yesterday was a doozy. He first told a largely black audience in Danville, Va., that he hoped they could help Obama win North Carolina. He followed that up with the claim that Mitt Romney wanted to “unchain Wall Street.” He then switched to a comic down-home accent and bellowed, “They’re gonna put y’all back in chains!” Willie Geist, a co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, was blunt: “If Paul Ryan, the Republican candidate, said that to an African-American audience, there would be calls this morning for him to get out of the race, for Mitt Romney to withdraw from the race. There’s a double standard.” But there has been a double standard for Joe Biden for decades, and almost every reporter in Washington knows it. Last night, a frustrated Rudy Giuliani acknowledged it on CNBC. “I’ve never seen a vice president that has made as many mistakes, said as many stupid things,” he told Larry Kudlow. “I mean, there’s a real fear if, God forbid, he ever had to be entrusted with the presidency, whether he really has the mental capacity to handle it. I mean, this guy just isn’t bright. He’s never been bright. He isn’t bright. And people think, ‘Well, he just talks a little too much.’ Actually, he’s just not very smart.” Biden has been very lucky that the national media have largely given him a pass until now. American history for the last half-century has been replete with Republicans who have been portrayed by the elite media as dim or addled — from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle to, of course, George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. No Democrat with comparable national stature has been saddled with a similar reputation. The media have tended to explain away Biden’s strange statements and unforced errors by saying, “Oh, well. That’s just Joe, you know.” Or they casually admit, “Well, he just talks a bit too much,” and then move on. In the middle of a hotly contested presidential campaign, that may now be changing. In the Washington Post yesterday, Alexandra Petri discussed “the trouble with Joe” and took the VP to task for “periodically alarming outbursts” that are unbecoming of the second-highest office in the land. “He inspires the sort of discomfort one feels upon introducing one’s fiancé to Grandpa after he has had a Scotch too many,” Petri scolded. “His cringe-inducing gaffes . . . inspire less anger than embarrassment.” A New York publishing source told me that “Biden is now seen as a Catholic Sam Goldwyn, and that’s not a good place to be.” Sam Goldwyn was the legendary Hollywood producer who was known for malapropisms (“A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on”). The White House has to worry that for the next 82 days Joe Biden will be under tremendous scrutiny — especially given the fact that Paul Ryan has become such a media-attention magnet. Everyone is anticipating the October 11 debate between Biden and Ryan. Biden’s penchant for off-the-cuff remarks doesn’t inspire confidence that he won’t unintentionally blurt something out when facing Ryan. For example, he embarrassed the Obama administration recently by prematurely revealing he was “comfortable” with gay marriage — forcing his boss to suddenly endorse gay marriage on a timetable not of his choosing. Biden’s erratic statements certainly should make Team Obama nervous. I’ve no doubt that some Democratic strategists would love for Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to swap jobs and bolster the Democratic ticket with a little Clinton magic. But there’s no evidence that Hillary would take that deal. If she wants to run, she is already the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination and would gain no advantage by being yoked to Obama, her old adversary, for the next three months if they lost or the next four years if they won. So Democrats are stuck with Old Joe, who will turn 70 this November. It’s said that few people vote for a presidential ticket based on who is filling the No. 2 slot. But some do, and they may matter in a very close race. It’s likely that by the time this campaign ends, a lot of people will be more nervous about Joe Biden being a heartbeat away from the presidency than about Paul Ryan. John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO and a co-author of the newly released Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (Encounter Books). nationalreview.com

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (54254)	8/16/2012 8:40:29 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Why The Screwed Generation Is Turning To Paul Ryan Boomers don’t want to give up their sweet deal, but the rest of us have reason to embrace Ryan’s “radical” plans, writes Kirsten Powers. by Kirsten Powers Aug 16, 2012 4:45 AM EDT We’ve finally been vindicated: Members of Generation X have a representative who is anything but a slacker. GOP Congressman Paul Ryan—the tireless, wonky, 42-year-old workout freak—has made history by becoming the first member of our generation to join a presidential ticket. It should come as a surprise to no one that his calling card is reforming entitlements. We hear incessantly about how members of today’s screwed generation face the prospect of less prosperous lives than those lived by their parents. But the maiden generation to stare down that gloomy prognosis was Generation X, the tiny slice of America born between about 1965 and 1980. (Ryan was born in 1970.) We were the first generation to be told we would never get Social Security or Medicare even though we would be forced to pay into these programs. When many X-ers graduated from college, stocking shelves at the Gap was considered a career choice, as jobs were few and far between amidst a major economic downturn. I won’t bore you with the horror show of the low-paying and miserable jobs I had for the first three years after college. Unfortunately, the future looks as bleak for today’s young people. No amount of coddling by their well-provided-for Boomer parents can save Generation Y and the Millennials from the dire economic conditions they face, including criminal levels of educational debt. Pensions have gone the way of the horse and buggy. You want to retire with health-care benefits, as both my professor parents did? Good luck. As the 1994 movie turned Gen-X mantra has it: Reality Bites. Generation X chronicler Jeff Gordiner, has written that Gen-Xers suffer from “athazagoraphobia”—“an abnormal and persistent fear of being forgotten or ignored.” Except it’s not really a phobia; it’s been reality for a long time. Maybe that is about to change. Enter Ryan. While Democrats attack his Medicare plan as “radical” and portray him as pushing granny off the cliff, young people don’t seem to be buying this caricature. Or maybe “radical” is what they want. A Zogby/JZ Analytics poll Tuesday showed increased support among voters 18-29 for the Romney ticket, which pollster John Zogby attributed to the Ryan pick. President Obama received just 49 percent of the youth vote, versus Romney’s 41 percent. (Obama took home 66 percent of the youth vote against McCain in 2008.) For those who think those numbers are an anomaly, take a look at Pew’s 2011 polling that found that among 18-29 year olds, 46 percent supported Ryan’s proposed Medicare changes with only 28 percent opposing (the rest had no opinion). Among 30-49 year olds it was 38 percent approving and 36 percent opposed. The strongest opposition to Ryan’s plan comes from those over 65, who ironically won’t even be affected by his plan since it would only apply to those 55 and under. Pew found that age, not party identification was the biggest predictor of how a person would feel about his plan. Jon Cowan, the CEO of the centrist think tank Third Way told me, “Ryan is doing the country a huge service by putting this on the table.” Cowan is the former founder of Lead or Leave, a Gen X group that gained prominence in the 1990s as it rang the alarm bells for reducing the deficit and dealing with entitlements. He doesn’t believe Ryan’s plan is the best way to reform Medicare, though he concedes that it is a serious plan. He cautions that Democrats may find themselves in political peril in the next 10 years if they don’t come up with a substantive alternative plan. He says, “There are a lot of younger voters who say of the Ryan plan, ‘at least I get something… at least there is a plan’. If you don’t get in there and offer a plan you give up the high ground on policy.” Yes, our expectations for government benefits when we retire have been lowered so much that the idea that we would get anything at all seems like a bonanza. Ryan’s plan also seems a lot less scary when you consider that his partner on it is the liberal Oregon Senator Ron Wyden. Still, the attacks by Democrats on Ryan and his plans for entitlement reform are scaring Boomers—who don’t want to lose the good deal they have and don’t realize Ryan’s plans wouldn’t impact anyone collecting Medicare now or who will start in the next 10 years—and could indeed cost Romney in November. But Ryan is young and is poised to be the intellectual leader of the conservative movement for the next generation. He will be a force to be reckoned with. Name-calling and distortions of his plan by Democrats is not an effective long-term strategy, nor is it good for the country. Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long. Kirsten Powers is a columnist for The Daily Beast. She is also a contributor to USA Today and a Fox News political analyst. She served in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1998 and has worked in New York state and city politics. Her writing has been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, The New York Observer, Salon.com, Elle magazine, and American Prospect online. For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at ] [url=http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/16/why-the-screwed-generation-is-turning-to-paul-ryan.html]http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/16/why-the-screwed-generation-is-turning-to-paul-ryan.html