"The most important thing Joe Biden can do"

I'd like to offer a quick elaboration of a wise tweet by LOLGOP:

The most important thing Joe Biden can do tonight is describe the Ryan Budget in the clearest terms possible.

The essence of the Romney/Ryan campaign is to hide the ball. The task is to make concrete the scope and the impact of the cuts Ryan calls for.  The template was laid down too long ago by a certain Barack Obama:

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. 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. And yet this isn’t a budget supported by some small group in the Republican Party. This is now the party’s governing platform.

Defending Medicaid is personal for Clinton

Ezra Klein reminds us that the core of Bill Clinton's extended policy rebuke to the GOP last night was an attack on their proposed cuts to Medicaid, not their Medicare plans. Medicaid is the locus, Klein says, of

arguably the most important and concrete policy difference between the two campaigns. The Medicare changes get more attention on both sides, but Romney and Ryan don’t intend to touch Medicare for 10 years, they swear they’ll honor the Medicare guarantee, and at least in Ryan’s most recent budget, he envisions the exact same long-term spending path as Obama does. By contrast, Romney and Ryan intend to begin cutting Medicaid immediately, and independent analyses suggest that their cuts could throw as many as 30 million people off the program. If you want to see the difference between Obama and Romney’s vision for American policy, it’s probably the single starkest example.

Democrats generally give talk of Medicaid short shrift because it's perceived as a program for the poor, and it's a sad fact of American political life that being perceived as channeling government resources to the poor is about as toxic as being perceived as showering largess on the rich.  Clinton took care of that by emphasizing Medicaid's middle-class constituencies (as well as children, also politically tonic):

Obama contrasts two economic visions -- and fact- vs. fiction-based campaigning

The euphoria will last only until the next batch of crummy economic data -- or until the Supreme Court hands down its decision on the Affordable Care Act.  But having indulged in a mid-afternoon watch of Obama's  major economics speech in Cleveland, I can't help but feel for a moment that he just can't lose. 

The speech's basic structure was admirably simple: a contrast of two diametrically opposed economic prescriptions (I won't say "visions," because I don't believe that Romney believes in the policies he's selling).  That contrast included what I craved: the same kind of detailed dissection of Romney's economic plan that Obama leveled at the Ryan budget in April -- which feels like an age ago. Of course the contrast was wrapped in layers of context  : the Bush-era policies (which Romney wants to reprise) that led to crisis; the unfinished recovery he's led; and, as Obama has sketched out repeatedly since 2007, a contrast between the American tradition as he sees it -- of prudent public investment and shared prosperity -- and the GOP policies that have taken us off that path -- radical tax cuts and deregulation. 

Also key, though, was a second, unstated contrast: between truth-telling and lying.  Obama never called Romney a liar, and he never accused him of not believing in the extremist GOP economic prescriptions that in his narrative led the US to disaster [update: I kind of changed my mind on this as I cut and pasted below...].  But he emphasized the factual basis of his own analysis of the GOP budget -- and set that analysis against the phony tissue of Obama-myths with which Romney & co. are saturating the airwaves.  Watch the way he contrasts his own attack with the attack on him. My emphases, natch.

"In Mitt Romney's America..." -- Scare us, Obama

As I've said before, these recent Gallup numbers frighten me: voters give Romney the edge in handling deficit and debt, 54-39, and economic growth, 52-42. Together they suggest that people are buying Romney's core pitch: an able businessman is well equipped to run the economy.  The perception could well be decisive.

On the campaign trail, Obama is contrasting his core economic vision with Romney's, and that's good. He's tying Romney's Bain tenure to his trickle-down economics, and that's fair and potentially helpful -- though I think he desperately needs a bulked-up Super Pac to keep his hands clean while the team offsets all the scurrilous shit that Crossroads & co. will heap on his own head.

But what seems to my amateur political sensibility the most effective way to tear down the perception of Romney's economic competence is also the most truthful way: hammer home in detail the ruinous spending cuts and tax cuts that Romney has proposed for the country.  Scare people. Because these proposals are scary -- and most Americans oppose them when they're spelled out in ways that Romney dare not do.

I think Obama was on the right track when he hammered the Ryan budget in detail, extrapolating the specific cuts that would be called for if the broad category cuts were distributed evenly, filling in the details that Ryan decorously left blank.  He needs to do the same with Romney's proposals, which are in sync with Ryan's. I want to see the economic equivalent of Ted Kennedy's vision of Robert Bork's America. Romney's America would suffer

Obama's "math" for Ryan's budget: the assumptions are the point

Ezra Klein has done yeoman's work defending the factual basis of Obama's attack on the Ryan budget, thoroughly pwning David Brooks' denunciation of that attack. (When it comes to arguing on a factual basis, Klein vs. Brooks has got to be the most lopsided serial mismatch in media today).  Klein demonstrates that the assumptions Obama made in sketching out the effects of the cuts were reasonable. I just want to gild the lily by highlighting that Obama went the extra mile and spelled out those assumptions, and why he was making them.

Klein lays out the challenge of evaluating the effects of the Ryan budget this way: