He’ll appear at The Villages, the world’s largest retirement community and a conservative stronghold that is a must stop for Republican candidates. In 2008, a massive crowd of between 30,000 and 60,000 seniors came out to a rally Sarah Palin held there. Despite the Republican-leanings it’s a clear sign the Romney campaign will continue to stay on the offense on Medicare, but with this trip they may be entering the lion’s den.
Ryan’s mother, who will accompany him, can help her son connect with the senior citizen audience. She lives part of the year in Lauderdale-By-The Sea and part of the year outside of Janesville, Wisconsin.
But if addressing a group of Florida seniors on Medicare reform is a challenge for Ryan, even as his drastic changes to the program would alter no benefits for those currently over 55, then Ryan is making his pitch to one of the friendliest lion’s dens possible: The Villages is a hotbed of pro-Romney money.
The retirement location itself made a hefty corporate donation to the main super PAC supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential bid. The Villages of Lake Sumter, Inc., the Florida retirement community that includes property development, golf and other recreational activities, donated $250,000 to Restore Our Future last June. Five individual residents donated a total of over $678,000 to the group, which also received money from utility, communications, commercial property, and investment companies located in The Villages, Fla.
Ryan and Romney continue to hone their Medicare argument. Ryan was asked directly about his criticism of cuts to future Medicare spending in the president’s health care plan Thursday and how that squares with his own signature budget plan, which includes those same exact cuts.
At a hot dog restaurant here he said because those cuts are already signed into law they are part of the baseline and if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, like the GOP ticket is proposing, that money would come back to Medicare.
“First of all, those are in the baseline, he put those cuts in,” said Ryan at the Original Hot Dog Shoppe, suggesting that he is simply working with the budget situation handed to him by the president and Democrats. “Second of all, we voted to repeal Obamacare repeatedly, including those cuts. I voted that way before the budget, I voted that way after the budget. So when you repeal all of Obamacare what you end up doing is that repeals that as well. In our budget we’ve restored a lot of that…We would never have done it in the first place. We voted to repeal the whole bill. I just don’t think the president’s going to be able to get out of the fact that he took $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare.”
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