As any good liberal will tell you, Republicans are really, really good at spin. They run circles around Democrats, with their Luntz-tested phrases and their iron message discipline! And much of the time, this is actually true. But not all the time. Sometimes, Democrats come up with excellent spin of their own, and other times, Republican spin fails. And now, Republicans appear to be really mad that they got outspun on their plan, contained in the Paul Ryan budget that all of them in the House voted for, to end Medicare as an insurance program and replace it with a voucher program that grows increasingly inadequate over time. Here's what House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said in explaining why they're dropping discussion of Medicare from the current budget fight:
Cantor blamed President Obama for killing any chances of reaping spending cuts from Medicare, which is often blamed as the biggest domestic source of skyrocketing deficits.
"The reality is this president has excoriated our Medicare proposal...this president has done nothing but attack the plan," Cantor said. "That is unfortunate."
As amusing as it is to hear Cantor whining that the president was mean by criticizing their policy idea, the lesson here is that spin has its limits. George W. Bush found this out when he tried to partially privatize Social Security in 2005. Back then, he said that the program was going bankrupt, and only by privatizing it could we "save" it. This time, Republicans said that Medicare is going to bankrupt the government, and only by privatizing it can we "save" it. They repeated this over and over again. Their message discipline was admirable. I'm sure the "we're going to save Medicare message tested well in some poll or other. But unfortunately for them (and fortunately for Medicare), they have very little credibility on this issue. As everyone knows, they've hated Medicare from the moment it was enacted. And their plan is not that hard to explain and easy to criticize. Finally, the critical audience here -- seniors -- pays very close attention to these debates. So when seniors catch them with a baseball bat high in the air over the program, and say, "What are you doing?!" and Republicans say, "Um...I'm trying to, um, save it!", the seniors respond with, "Yeah, right. Put down the bat and walk away slowly, before we vote your ass out." If there's some fantastically creative way to sell seniors on dissolving Medicare, no one has heard it.
And one other thing. The argument Republicans made in response to seniors' objections -- Hey, don't worry, this doesn't apply to anyone over 55! -- could hardly have been less persuasive. It was an admission that no one actually in the program would favor this change, so it was basically saying, "I know you think this is awful, but it won't be awful for you, just awful for your children and grandchildren." That's just bad spin.
