Republicans came to the realization a while ago that they have a Medicare problem. The party voted, en masse, to phase out the entire Medicare system and replace it with a wildly unpopular voucher scheme. The problem became more acute when Paul Ryan, the architect of the plan to end Medicare, joined the national ticket.
So, GOP officials tried to turn their weakness around, attacking Democrats for approving Medicare savings and strengthening the Medicare system’s finances. It doesn’t matter if it’s nonsensical — the point is, Republicans could credibly say Dems “cut” Medicare.
But there’s a twist: Republicans, including Paul Ryan, embraced the same Medicare savings in their own budget plan, leaving the entire party in the awkward position of supporting and opposing the same policy at the same time. It’s even one of the driving messages of Mitt Romney’s entire presidential campaign.
How do Republicans defend their incoherence? They don’t (via Sahil Kapur).
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is promoting the Romney-Ryan ticket as a team offering a credible, detailed plan for turning the country around. But some of those details proved troublesome in a sit-down interview with Fortune on Thursday. […] Asked about the inconsistency of Ryan attacking cuts his own plan embraced, Cantor begged off. “The assumption was that, um, the, the, ah, again — I probably can’t speak to that in an exact way so I better just not,” he said. I’ve followed Cantor’s career fairly closely for many years, and that may be the single greatest thing he’s ever said in public. The Romney-Ryan ticket is telling a hypocritical, self-defeating lie, and Cantor knows it. Asked to defend it, Cantor, thankfully, couldn’t think of a better lie to rationalize the other lie, so he stammered and gave up.
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