From Special Report with Bret Baier |Tuesday, August 14, 2012
On Paul Ryan’s interview with Brit Hume:
I thought he handled it very well. I think having him out there showing how affable he is, how much he knows, how he can explain….
He’s got one problem, and I think they knew it was a problem going in. The details of the Ryan plan have some things which don’t mesh with what Romney is running on, and which are a little harder to defend.
What Ryan has to say is: “Look, I proposed a plan in Congress. It was a Congressional plan. It was rejected by the Democratic Senate and by the President. It is now history. I can defend it if you want, but it’s complicated. It has to do with the baseline CBO estimates and all that. The active plan right now, what we are running on and what the country is going to see [if we are elected], is the Romney plan. I want to explain that.”
Because, as you heard with the interview with Brit, he was saying the Romney plan abolishes the raiding of the Medicare trust fund that happens under Obamacare, but the Ryan plan in Congress did not. So he has to simply say, “I can explain it, but it’s not relevant. It’s history. I’m running under the Romney plan and that is it.” Otherwise he will end up in the weeds and distracted.
And they have to stay on the attack, especially on Medicare.
On the contrast between the Romney-Ryan plan for Medicare and Obama’s plan for Medicare:
When you [Bret Baier] interviewed Obama, you asked him three times — and he got annoyed — about this raiding of Medicare to fund Obamacare…
And I’m sure the President remembers it well because you kept saying, as the CBO had said, that the administration double counted the money. It pretended that the money was going in the [Medicare] trust fund and at the same time it was funding the 30 million uninsured in Obamacare.
You cannot use a dollar to do two things.
He [Obama] never answered it — and he got quite annoyed when you kept asking it.
On political effect of Romney’s criticism of President Obama’s energy plan:
When you go for coal [country], which is where Romney is going now, it’s almost half of all the electrical production in the United States. Solar, for example, is 0.2 percent. It’s minuscule.
If you are going to be the green energy guy, you are going to get people on the left — that Obama already has. To appeal to the country nationally, you go for coal, the restriction on oil drilling, the fracking regulations — you when the argument in a very broad way.
Keystone is the symbol of it, but coal is the heart of it. The [anti-coal] regulation was passed quietly in the EPA that everybody in coal country knows will devastate the industry.
On Vice President Biden’s most recent execrable comments about Republicans putting “y’all back in chains:”
Look, this guy [Biden] is so off the wall that he is able to make lifetime of gaffes and he doesn’t get attacked for it because nobody expects any better. You know, it’s the crazy uncle in the attic, as Ross Perot used to say….
I think it [the “chains” comment] is offensive — if anybody else said it, it would have been a huge deal. But Joe Biden, is it “a big f’ing deal”? I don’t know…
F’ing?
Well, you know, I’m just — I’m quoting the Vice President of the United States [saying that re: Obamacare].