5 things Obama has to make perfectly clear tonight!!
Barack Obama will have probably a bigger audience then the last debate and he most likely has just 90 minutes to save his political life. Thats not to mention to make sure that all of us Democrats who have been sitting on our asses and not paying attention understand that the risk of him losing is REAL, and that these crazy Tea Party people could actually be in charge to fundamentally change our country for a VERY long time if we don’t wake up and get people back out & vote.
There are 5 things that he has to make very clear by the end of this debate.
1) Obama has to make it very clear that the tax plan that Romney is planning will be 4.8 Trillion dollars no matter what Romney says. Tell us the math out loud and how you get to the number 4.8 Trillion. Then tell us about the additional increase in Military spending of 2 trillion for a total o 6.8 Trillion less revenue coming into the Govt. He must stress in the harshest terms possible that even closing ALL of the current loopholes in the world for the rich wont be able to pay for this tax cut without blowing up the deficit just like George Bush did with his tax cut it. (Anytime you can compare Romney to Bush he should do it) That it is Not mathematically possible to make this tax cut revenue neutral, and he is either going to have raise taxes or fees on the middle class, or blow a huge whole in our huge national deficit just to give a Gigantic tax break to super wealthy just like George Bush did.
That the math for this Tax plan doesn’t add up and he has to push Romney to make him try to explain it and stay on him. Don’t let him get away with his 6 studies lie. Then when Romney pushes those 6 studies, he has to pounce on them and say they are hardly studies, that they are blogs from conservatives and not actual studies. Make him admit where those studies actually came from, then make him explain in simple math to the people how he can possibly do it, and say they deserve to know before the election. Nail him hard here!
That in order for these these tax cuts to work and be revenue neutral, Romney would have implement the Ryan Budget that will change Medicare forever from what it is to a voucher system and will be terrible for senior. Obama must also stress that Romney and Ryan want to privatize Social security, and cut Medicaid for the very poor.
That the tax cuts will cut Medicaid by 30%, and that cut wont take affect in 10 years like the Medicare cuts would, but will have an instant impact today on seniors. That It will affect how you pay for nursing homes right away unlike the cuts to Medicare that will only affect the people who are 55 and under…Obama has failed to make that very clear in any guest appearances or stump speeches…I don’t know why they haven’t stressed that more. People care very much about how they will pay for nursing homes.
He also has to make it very clear that this huge tax cut to the rich has never, and will never create jobs! Make sure to point out that this was just tried 10 years ago by George Bush and led to the biggest driver of out national debt, and ultimately the huge economic disaster that he had to inherit and try to dig us out of.
Then he has to contrast and to talk about how he has created 5.2 Million new Jobs in the last 4 years, Rescued GM and saved over a million jobs when Romney said he would let Detroit just go bankrupt and let our biggest and best manufacturing industry just go to China or another country. That it might not be a big deal to Romney because he loves to outsource American jobs, but that Obama feels the need to keep those good paying middle class jobs right here in the United states. That he has done all of this with basically no help from a congress that said their first priority is to make him a one term president and help him not fix our economy, If Romney tries to say he just wanted a managed bankruptcy, Obama should challenge him to say what private institution would have give the money for it. Name one, and that even Bail capital said it wasn’t a good investment for them.
2) Obama has to really find a way to emotionally address the women of the country and inform them in the most blatant possible way. He has to make it perfectly clear that the next President will appoint probably 2 new Supreme court appointees, and that if Romney is elected, Roe vs Wade would probably be over turned. He has to really tell these women, and fathers of women that this isn’t fantasy, but that it will be reality to millions of women who don’t want men telling them what to do with their bodies.
In the process he must point to many examples where states have republican control of all of the houses of Government, and that they are obsessed with limiting women’s rights with forced vaginal Ultrasounds, contraception in their insurance, and equal pay rights,. He has to talk about how Obama care lowers health care costs for all women and makes contraception free lowering even more costs and that if Romney is elected, you will lose that. He has to reach out in a big way and appeal to the women voter and scare her back into reality. And get the polls back to where they were before the first debate.
3) He has to make it perfectly clear to Latinos that there will be no immigration reform if Republicans take over and that the papers please laws of Arizona could become national with such a radical Republican party house of Reps. That the dream act will not ever become law. That if latino's aren’t motivated to vote, this should wake you up an that they should look to states like Arizona and Alabama for what immigration reform will look like under Romney with such a radical Republican House of Reps. Romney will just sign anything the pass and that if you look in the Republican controlled states where these type laws have already passed, it could be a vision of where a national bill might bo under Romney. Talk about how the guy who promoted bill 187 in California is his Latino policy rep…That with Obama, we can pass the Dream act, and can get real immigration reform passed so that every person in the country can come out of the shadows and feel proud to be an American.
4) He has to talk about the wars that are ending and how we need to stop building up other countries to fix them, and take the money from the Wars we are ending to nation build right here at home and create millions of jobs.
That Romney and his neocon friends from George Bush's team seem to just be itching to bog us down in another long and useless gulf war with Iran or Syria and that his entire team of defense advisor comes from the Bush team that led us into to of the longest most costly wars in our history. He has to talk about how he killed Osama and has decimated Al Qaeda. That although peace in the middle east isn’t finished yet, he has eliminated Osama and got rid of Khadafy and though his efforts and those of his administration, he has helped imposed the toughest sanctions ever on Iran that will help make sure they never get a Nuclear bomb, and he will make sure that never happens. That his foreign policy has been a big success and we are looked at much better in the world and it would be crazy to go back to the bush foreign policies that had us hated in the world.
5) Last and most important, he has to talk about where we were when he came into office, where we are right now and where we are going in the next 4 years. That when he came in, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month and that we now have 31 months of Job growth. That he has created 5.2 million jobs, and saved our auto industry with a very gutsy call that Romney would have never made. That he has put restrictions on wall street so they cant cause the same financial mess they did before. That he has passed laws to put rules in place to make sure that wont happen again and Romney just wants to undue all those rules and let Wall street go wild again. That he has passed a healthcare law that makes sure people with pre existing conditions are never left out again, and extends the life of Medicare for 8 years. It allows kids to stay on their parents plan until they are 26, and no one will ever go bankrupt again if they get sick. That all that could go away if they put Romney in to take it away. That if Democrats who worked so hard last time to get some change, this is what change looks like and if they don’t want it to change back, they have to come out and vote.
He has to give a vision of the future and talk about his very good American Jobs bill that would create 1.2 million jobs right away, and how it would invest in Education, New Green Energy jobs that are there for the taking, retraining hundreds of thousands of people out of work for jobs that we need right now, , and create Big new infrastructure projects like Rail, and airports and briges to rebuild this country from the ground up and create millions of new good paying jobs that cant be outsourced like Romney likes to do with his companies. A bill that invests in math and science to corner the new Micro biology sections of the economy to get all the new innovative drugs and therapies created right here in the United states, and have the worlds best scientists.
Not to cut education like Romey and Ryan have laid out in their Ideas. That this bill has been sitting in congress for over a year and could be in place right now if not for the obstruction of the Republican Party on things that everybody seems to want. That he wants to rebuild America for the next 100 years and make us the country. He has to make it clear that this choice is more important then anyone realizes and he is trying to warn us right now of the consequences. That the country will change for a very long time. That once it changes, hey see how hard it can be to change things back with a split congress, and that Republicans will push through everything they want and these things wont be very popular a whole lot of Americans who are used to things being the way they are.
If Obama can get these points across tonight, I think he can repair some of the terrible damage he did in the last debate. He has to get Dems fired up again and get us ready to go!!
If Anyone else has anything to add, just leave it in the comments and I’ll update it in the post later…