To: POTUS

From: Robert Reich

RE: Upcoming debate

Your passive performance in the last debate was damaging because it reenforced the Republican claim that you’ve been too passive in getting jobs back and in responding to terrorism abroad.

That doesn’t mean you have to “come out swinging” this time. You need to be yourself, and one of your qualities that the public finds reassuring is your steadiness and authenticity, by contrast to Romney’s unsteady flip-flopping and apparent willingness to say and be anything. But you will need to be more energetic and passionate.

And although the “town meeting” style debate in which you’ll be answering audience questions isn’t conducive to sharp give-and-take with Romney, look for every opportunity to nail him. Indignance doesn’t come naturally to you, but you have every reason to be indignant on behalf of the American people. 

Emphasize these five points:

1. Not only is the economy is improving, but there’s no reason to trust Romney’s claim he would improve it more quickly. He’s given no specifics about how he’d pay for his massive tax cut for the wealthy, or what he’d replace ObamaCare with, or how he’d regulate Wall Street if he repeals Dodd-Frank. His record to date has flip-flopped on every major issue. Why should Americans trust his assertions?

2. Our problems require we pull together, but Romney and his party want to pull us apart. Romney has praised Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration law profiling Hispanics, and has called for “voluntary deportation” by making life intolerable for undocumented workers. He is against equal marriage rights. He wants to ban abortions, and his party and running mate want to ban them even in the case of rape or incest. He’s determined to make the rich richer and the rest of us poorer. Romney is beholden to a radical right-wing Republican party that is out of step with most of America.

3. Romney’s “reverse Robin Hood” agenda is inappropriate at a time when the wealthy are taking home a larger share of total income and wealth than they have in a century, and when the middle class is still struggling. He wants to cut taxes on the rich by almost $5 trillion – which inevitably means higher taxes on the rest of us; and over 60 percent of its budget cuts come out of programs for the poor and working middle class. He’s determined to turn Medicare into vouchers whose value won’t keep up with rising healthcare costs, and turn Medicaid over to cash-starved states. His comment about “47 percent” of Americans not paying taxes and taking government handouts was not only wrong (every working person pays payroll taxes, and every consumer pays sales taxes; and the biggest so-called “entitlements” are Social Security and Medicare, which are insurance programs that Americans pay for during their working years). The comment also reveals a callousness and divisiveness that’s the opposite of what we need now. Romney wants to set Wall Street loose again when the Street’s greed got us into the mess we’re still trying to get out of.

4. Romney views America as if it was one huge corporation, but we’re not a corporation; we’re a nation. He says corporations are people; touts his years at Bain as if making companies profitable qualifies him to be president; wants to deregulate corporations and Wall Street; and assumes CEOs and the wealthy are “job creators,” and if we cut their taxes they’ll have more incentive to create jobs. None of this is true. The nation exists to make lives better for all its people – making sure that corporations treat their workers as assets to be developed rather than as costs to be cut. Companies have been slow to create jobs not because of insufficient profits but because of inadequate customers. The vast American middle class are the real job creators, but they don’t have enough money in their pockets because too many companies have broken the basic bargain linking wages to productivity.

5. On foreign policy, Romney wants to rush to judgment, blaming the administration for not acting quickly enough in Libya on scant information. But that rush-to-judgment mentality is exactly what got us into Iraq eight years ago on the pretext of “weapons of mass destruction.” Two days ago we marked the 50^th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. Had John F. Kennedy rushed to judgment as Romney wants to, humankind would have been obliterated in a nuclear holocaust. 

Be indignant, but measured and steady – as you naturally are. Practice your closing (your last closing was listless) so the nation can see clearly the choice: We’re all in it together, or we’re on our own.

I thought Biden won last night’s debate because he came off as genuine, passionate, and brimming with conviction. Ryan, by contrast, seemed like a wooden marionette, a kid out of his depth relative to someone who not only knew the facts but lived them.

On taxes, Ryan couldn’t come up with any details about what loopholes he and Romney would close, or how their magic arithmetic (giant tax cut for the wealthy plus $2 trillion more for the military than the Joint Chiefs of Staff want) can possibly be paid for without socking it to the middle class.

By contrast, Biden made the case for average working people whose wages have barely risen in thirty years but who are bearing a higher total tax burden (payroll, sales, property, income) on a higher percent of their income than high rollers like Romney — and why the well off should do more.

On Medicare, Ryan couldn’t explain why his plan wasn’t a voucher program that “saved” money only by shifting the costs on to seniors who would end up holding the bag as medical costs rose. Biden effectively defended the President’s plan to save Medicare by cutting excessive payments to providers.

Biden also pointed out that Ryan and his allies had tried to privatize Social Security. Score another one for Joe.

On abortion, Ryan had to admit he and Romney would work to prevent women from having the right to choose an abortion if they needed and wanted one. Biden made it clear his religious beliefs about when life began should not, in his view, force anyone who didn’t share them to follow them.

I thought Biden’s closing could have been tougher, drawing a sharper contrast between the Romney-Ryan “you’re on your own” worldview, and the “we’re in it all together” belief that has built America — and which Obama and Biden represent.

But overall it was Biden’s night. He not only trounced Ryan, but also, in the process, trounced Romney. Joe Biden is an average Joe solidly grounded in America’s working middle class — nothing pretentious or devious about him — in contrast to the plutocrat who heads the Republican ticket, and the billionaires who are backing him.

TO: VPOTUS

FROM: Robert Reich

RE: Debate

Beware: Paul Ryan will appear affable. He’s less polished and aggressive than Romney, even soft-spoken. And he acts as if he’s saying reasonable things.

But under the surface he’s a rightwing zealot. And nothing he says or believes is reasonable – neither logical nor reflecting the values of the great majority of Americans.

Your job is to smoke Ryan out, exposing his fanaticism. The best way to do this is to force him to take responsibility for the regressive budget he created as chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Ryan won’t be able to pull a Romney – pretending he’s a moderate – because the Ryan budget is out there, with specific numbers.

It’s an astounding document that Romney fully supports. And it fills in the details Romney has left out of his proposals. Mitt Romney is a robot who will say and do whatever he’s programmed to do. Ryan is the robot’s brain. The robot has no heart. It’s your job to enable America to see this.

I suggest you hold up a copy of the Ryan budget in front of the cameras. You might even read selected passages.

Emphasize these points: Ryan’s budget turns Medicare into vouchers. It includes the same $716 billion of savings Romney last week accused the President of cutting out of Medicare – but instead of getting it from providers he gets it from the elderly.

It turns Medicaid over to cash-starved states, with even less federal contribution. This will hurt the poor as well as middle-class elderly in nursing homes.

Over 60 percent of its savings come out of programs for lower-income Americans – like Pell grants and food stamps.

Yet it gives huge tax cuts to the top 1 percent – some $4.7 trillion over the next decade. (This is the same top 1 percent, you might add, who have reaped 93 percent of the gains from the recovery, whose stock portfolios have regained everything they lost and more, and who are now taking home a larger share of total income than at any time in the last eighty years and paying the lowest taxes than at any time since before World War II.)

As a result it doesn’t reduce the federal debt at all. In fact, it worsens it.

On top of all this, Ryan is on record – as is Romney – for wanting to repeal both ObamaCare (taking coverage away from 30 million Americans) and the Dodd-Frank law (thereby giving cover to Wall Street).

Your challenge will be get this across firmly and clearly, with an appropriate degree of indignation – on a medium that rewards style over substance, glibness over detail, and optimistic happy talk over grim reality.

My suggestion: Be cheerfully aggressive. Take Ryan on directly and sharply but do so with a smile. Force him to take responsibility for the regressiveness of his budget and the radicalism of his ideology.

Prepare your closing carefully (unlike the President seemed to have done last week), and tell America the unvarnished truth: Romney and Ryan plan to do a reverse Robin Hood at a time in our nation’s history when the rich have never had it so good while the rest haven’t been as economically insecure since the Great Depression.

Their agenda is all the more remarkable in that we have a growing budget deficit to deal with, along soaring healthcare costs and aging boomers without enough to retire on because their net worth went down the drain with their homes.

The fundamental question is whether we’re still all in it together – whether as American citizens we continue to have obligations to one another to assure equal opportunity and help for those who need it – or we’re on our own, without a common bond or a common good. Romney and Ryan represent the latter view, a view utterly at odds with what we have accomplished as a nation. 

I keep hearing that Mitt Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan “enables the country to have the debate it needs to have,” or “permits us to have a grownup discussion,” or “finally presents America with a real choice.” The New York Times oped page proclaims: “Let the Real Debate Begin!”

Debate? What debate?

Romney isn’t even standing by Ryan’s budget plan. He’s been distancing himself from it from the moment he tabbed Ryan for the ticket.  “I’m the one running for President,” he keeps saying in response to reporters’ questions about whether he agrees with Ryan.

Not even Ryan will say publicly what the Romney economic plan entails. “We haven’t run the numbers yet,” he repeats – as if there were numbers in the Romney plan to run. But the numbers in Romney’s plan are like the numbers in Romney’s tax returns – they’re invisible to anyone who might have an interest in knowing.

But even if Romney were to adopt Ryan’s budget plan intact we still wouldn’t have a real debate because Ryan’s own plan itself lacks specifics that add up.

None of the budgets Ryan has come up with as chair of the House Budget Committee indicate which tax loopholes he’d close and exactly which programs for lower-income Americans he’d eliminate in order to balance the budget.

Ryan claims that his revenue targets can be met by “broadening the tax base,” but he hasn’t said how he’d do it.  He’s insisted on keeping two of the biggest loopholes that overwhelmingly favor the wealthy —the preferential tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

In fact, Ryan’s budget is larded with so much defense spending and so many tax cuts for the wealthy that it doesn’t even lower the debt – when exposed to realistic assumptions. 

It baldly assumes that tax cuts for the rich will generate revenues totaling 18.4 percent of the economy over the next decade. That’s supply-side nonsense. When the non-partisan Tax Policy Center looked at Ryan’s budget plan, it calculated that revenues would average only 16.3 percent over the decade — $4 trillion less.

Under that revenue estimate, Ryan’s budget would increase debt as a share of the economy for more than four decades – pushing the public debt to over 175 percent of GDP by 2050.

We can’t even have a clear debate about programs like Medicare, because Romney and Ryan seem determined to sow as much confusion as possible about their proposed voucher system. (At least Romney says his own approach to Medicare is “almost identical” to Ryan’s.)

They’ve been charging all week that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act “robs” Medicare of more than $700 billion over the next decade. In reality, the Romney-Ryan plan saves exactly the same amount. But it does so by shifting costs to seniors whose vouchers won’t keep up with the projected cost of health care. Obama’s savings come from reduced payments to medical providers.

What’s really driving Medicare costs – as well as future federal budget deficits – is the increasing costs of health care overall, combined with aging boomers. But don’t expect a debate over how to reign in healthcare costs because Romney and Ryan haven’t put forward a healthcare plan. All they want to do is repeal the Affordable Care Act, leaving 50 million Americans without health insurance coverage.

We won’t have a clear debate over whether to raise tax rates on the wealthy because Romney and Ryan are sticking to the conservative bromide that the wealthy and big corporations need more tax cuts in order to create jobs – even though America’s top earners are now taking home more of the nation’s income than they have in eighty years, and corporations are sitting on more than a trillion dollars of cash they don’t know what to do with.

We won’t even have a debate over how to prevent another meltdown of Wall Street or a taxpayer bailout of “too-big-to-fail” banks because Romney and Ryan don’t have a plan for preventing another Wall Street crisis. All they want to do is repeal the Dodd-Frank act.

Romney’s choice of Ryan won’t usher in a “real debate” about much of anything except, perhaps, the danger to our democracy of billionaires like casino-magnate Sheldon Adelson (whose blessing Ryan immediately sought this week) who are pouring tens of millions of dollars into negative advertising. (Adelson alone has committed $100 million of his fortune.)

Those negative ads, by the way, are making it all the harder for average Americans to sort out the truth from well-financed big lies – and understand, let alone debate, the big issues this election year.