The Debate: Ten Offensive Plays

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TEN PLAYS FOR GOING ON OFFENSE

1.     The 47%

• If you want to know how a politician will treat you once elected or whose side he's really on, listen to how he talks about people behind closed doors.
• Let's remember what Mitt Romney was caught telling his millionaire donors: half of Americans "will never take personal responsibility" for their lives and see themselves as "victims."
• Who did he write off as irresponsible? Working parents, seniors with Social Security, troops in combat zones, students.
• How Romney sees -- or fails to see -- the people of this great country says more about him than about the Americans he has written off.

2.     Romney's Tax Plan

• Don't feel like a "victim" yet? His tax hike for the entire middle class might change that.
• His complaint is that working families, students, and retired seniors are irresponsible dependents who aren’t paying enough taxes.
• No wonder his tax plan would make you pay more so the richest few can pay less. How much? He'd make a middle class family pay $2,000 more so a multimillionaire can pay $250,000 less.
• It's as if Romney thinks that struggling people aren't struggling enough and our middle class isn't already bearing enough of the burden.

3.     Top-Down Class Warfare

• In America, our leaders are supposed to work for all of us, not just the wealthiest few.
• But Romney & Ryan are planning a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the already-rich -- the largest redistribution of income from regular people to the richest few in modern U.S. history.
• Their top-down class warfare agenda  would make the entire middle class pay more taxes, end guaranteed Medicare, and cut Social Security -- all to pay for more wasteful tax breaks for the already-rich.
• As Warren Buffett says, the only class warfare in America is being waged by his class, and they're winning.

4.     The Poor

• Romney's new TV ads are trying to convince us that he cares about regular people, including the poor. But as he was caught admitting, he's "not concerned about the very poor" and it's not his job to worry about "those people."
• It's no surprise -- we've seen his true colors before. He wants to make seniors, children, and vulnerable families bear more of the burden just so the richest few can have more tax giveaways.
• In fact, the Romney-Ryan agenda gets over 60% of its funding cuts from programs that serve struggling families.
• Which do you believe: What a politician says on-script in a TV commercial, or what he says behind closed doors and what his plans says?

5.     Republican Sabotage

• Republican politicians admit their top priority is defeating Obama. We need more jobs and less sabotage, but they want Obama to fail more than they want America to succeed.
• Republican leaders -- including Romney's VP pick -- met on the President's first day in office to plot how they could sabotage and undermine the economy in order to make Obama fail.
• No wonder Washington Republicans like Congressman Ryan tried to kill over 7 million jobs last year alone. That's like setting fire to the house, keeping your foot on the water hose, and telling everyone the firefighters did it.  
• It's the worst kind of politicians who keep voting against their own constituents’ interests -- so their constituents will vote against the President.

6.     Romney's Tax Returns

• It turns out that Romney paid only 10% on his federal taxes and donated half a million dollars to the IRS, just to try to make his tax rate look better politically.
• He's manipulating his taxes in plain sight -- and refusing to come clean on the rest of it.
• What's worse than voters thinking that a politician didn't pay any taxes? Whatever Mitt's hiding.

7.     Offshoring

• For Romney, nothing says "I believe in America" like stashing his millions in the Caymans and sending American jobs to China.
• Romney's tax plan would let multinational corporations get away with never paying any U.S. income taxes on their profits overseas -- resulting in 800,000 jobs created in other countries instead of America. That's on top of the millions of jobs they've offshored already.
• Of Romney's investments in 34 offshore companies, 30 are located in offshore tax havens, like the Cayman Islands. He even had investments in a state-owned China oil company and a company in Russia -- a country he called America's #1 enemy.

8.     Medicare

• Let's be clear: Obamacare preserves every dime of Medicare benefits and strengthens it in the long-term. Romney-Ryan does not. In fact, their plan would cut $2 trillion from Medicare -- to pay for more tax giveaways to the already-rich.
• It takes some brass to attack a guy for what you did, but that's exactly what Romney is doing when he attacks Obamacare for the same $700 billion savings he supported. Except now he'd put that waste back into Medicare, weakening it and shortening the life of its trust fund.
• The bottom line is that Romney-Ryan would end Medicare as we know it and replace it with a little voucher. They'd make seniors go fight with the big insurance companies to get coverage.

9.     Romney's "Jobs Plan"

• Here's the real story: despite all the Republican sabotage, Americans are set to create 12 million jobs over the next four years if Romney does nothing -- but he's still trying to take credit for it.
• Romney actually thinks we can put Americans back to work by cutting jobs, educate our kids by laying off teachers, and level the playing field for small businesses by rigging it in favor of big corporations.
• That's his "middle class plan" -- doubling down on the same trickle down that failed our middle class in the first place. That must be why economists say that his plan would mean massive layoffs -- two million jobs lost in the next two years alone.
• Does Romney know how to make himself and his Wall Street donors very rich? Absolutely. How to offshore American jobs to China? Yup. Is he a voice for working families? No way.

10.  Romney's Job Application

• When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he claimed his corporate experience would help him create jobs. It didn't. In fact, under Romney, Massachusetts dropped to 47th out of 50 states on job creation.
• When Romney attacks government, let's remember the $1.5 billion he got from the federal government during his Olympics job -- not to mention the millions in bailout dollars he got for his wealthy investors in his corporate job.
• Yet Romney refuses to come clean on his tax returns and how exactly he made all that money. The rest of us know that you cannot get hired if you won't give your work history or go through a background check.

We develop messaging by aggregating, analyzing and distilling polling, tested messaging, and expert recommendations, and monitoring the media to identify what is and isn't working. See here for some of the experts and organizations we draw on.