BLOOMINGDALE, Ill. — Tammy Duckworth spent 10 minutes calling Bingo numbers during a game at the Bloomingdale Horizon retirement home, then she took questions.
The first was predictable enough: What are you going to do for seniors?
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Full text of President Obama’s speech on national security
“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” the president said.
“First and foremost,” Duckworth began, “I’m going to preserve Medicare and Social Security. I’m not going to let them turn Medicare into a voucher program.”
Duckworth is a Democrat running for Congress in a district in the Chicago suburbs, and “them,” of course, is shorthand for Republicans, mostly Mitt Romney and his new running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, whose Medicare proposal reemerged this week as the favorite blunt-force instrument of congressional Democrats in their fight to retake control of the House.
Ryan’s elevation to the national GOP ticket has allowed Democrats to reprise their savaging of the Ryan plan with tactics they know well, having used them to great political effect over the past two years.
Last week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee unleashed a barrage of attacks on Republican candidates with a series of robo-calls in about 50 congressional races. And the first of the DCCC’s television ads since Ryan joined the GOP ticket was launched Thursday; it targeted freshman Rep. Dan Benishek (R-Mich.) for his vote in support of Ryan’s Medicare overhaul.
The ad features a clip of Benishek praising efforts to “privatize” Medicare and Social Security.
Democrats think this is a winning issue for them and are gleeful that Ryan’s higher profile has made it the center of the campaign debate.
Duckworth and other Democrats said Ryan’s addition to the Republican ticket only amplifies concerns they’ve discussed for months.
“You’ve got all these Harry Houdinis all over the country trying to untangle themselves from the Ryan budget,” said Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the DCCC. “And we’re not going to let them.”
Duckworth, for example, told the crowd that Ryan’s proposal would abandon seniors, leaving them to fend for themselves.
“My concern is that I don’t want my mom to have a $600 voucher and tell her, here, you go negotiate with an insurance company on your own,” Duckworth said. “I don’t think that’s right.”
Those in the room in Bloomingdale agreed.
“This is really ridiculous,” said Fran Powrozek, 82. “We’re citizens. We don’t have enough money to live on the way it is. They already cut my insurance for prescription drugs.”
But Powrozek and her bingo partners admitted Thursday after Duckworth spoke that they don’t know much about Ryan’s plan.
“For two or three days, they’ve been talking about him on TV,” Jean Corbeil, 75, said. “They say he’ll be good — I don’t know.”
Ryan’s plan leaves Medicare benefits untouched for current retirees but, over time, would shift the program from an open-ended guarantee of care to a capped payment to seniors for them to use to purchase private insurance.
Ryan and Romney have worked to neutralize the attacks by slamming Democrats for including cuts to Medicare providers in the 2010 Obama health-care overhaul. Ryan assumed those same cuts in his budget proposal adopted by the House this year, but Romney has said he would restore them.
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