Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin did a nice job of hammering home a few points about presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney on this Sunday's Face the Nation and I hope we see more Democrats continue to do the same.
I don't think most average voters care whatsoever about the ridiculous talking point we heard all week on the Supreme Court ruling on the individual mandate and whether it's a tax or a penalty. Who the hell cares? I can tell you this wasn't on the radar of anyone I encounter in everyday life and the people who don't follow politics that I'm around had no idea the court even ruled on the Affordable Care Act, much less some argument on the semantics of what you call the penalty on free riders.
Believe me, that is the kind of stuff that makes people's eyes start rolling back into their heads if you even try to find out if they read about the decision. The right wingers in the media won't shut up about it because they feel they're scoring points if they just use the words Democrat and taxes in the same sentence over and over again. The trouble for Romney is they're doing it now when almost no one is paying a damn bit of attention to them other than their hard core base, who was never going to vote for Obama in a million years anyway or the tiny segment of the population that covers politics year round.
Rather than continuing to respond to that nonsense, I'm happy to see the Democrats pointing out the hypocrisy of Romney now being against a plan that was essentially the same as the law his state passed when he was governor, as Durbin did here. Bottom line is, the Affordable Care Act was based on Romney's plan and now he wants to pretend he never passed the same thing in his state, because apparently he believes most voters out there are incapable of reading or will never watch old video tape and that everyone who votes in the upcoming election either a Fox "News" watcher or Rush Limbaugh listener.
Durbin also did a good job of hitting Romney on the offshore tax havens and Swiss bank account. The more I see the Democrats actually getting after Romney as they've been doing in recent weeks for Bain, for outsourcing, for the offshore tax havens and for the hypocrisy and as I've watched his campaign really have a lot of trouble responding, I've got to wonder how Romney's going to make it through the debates.
SCHIEFFER: Senator Durbin, started Governor Barbour off with a quote from a Republican. Here's one from a Democrat, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in The Huffington Post this week that President Obama did inherit a bad economy from George Bush. But he says, "The excuse is wearing thin. It is his economy now, and most voters don't care what inherited." And "if the economy stays bad," Robert Reich said "he's not going to be elected." Is that fair? Does he have a point?
DURBIN: Well, I-- I tell you, it's-- it's clear that economy is the number one issue. It's also clear that the month that Obama was sworn into office we lost eight hundred thousand jobs that month. Last month we created eighty thousand jobs in the private sector. In the last twenty-eight months we have seen consistent private sector job growth.
It is also clear that when it comes to contrasting, Mitt Romney has no economic plan. He wants to return us to those thrilling days of the bush yesteryears that brought us into this recession. But he has two other problems in his campaign that have really dragged him down, he can't get lift. The second one is the whole question of health care reform. Let's get down to the bottom line here. Mitt Romney is the Obamacare daddy. He gave birth to this baby up in Massachusetts and now he doesn't recognize it; he can't pick out any straight-- strains in the hereditary chain there that looked like anything that he did in Massachusetts.
But let me tell you, Bob, there's a third issue looming here and it's all about a lighthouse off Nan-- Nantucket called Sand Katie. If you read the vi-- Vanity Fair piece and The Associated Press piece we understand the following. Mitt Romney has failed to make an economic disclosure that every President and candidate for President has made in the last thirty-six years goes back to his father, who disclosed twelve years of tax returns, he's disclosed one.
Secondly, he is the first and only candidate for President of the United States with a Swiss bank account with tax shelters, with tax avoidance schemes that involve so many foreign countries. And the third is that when it comes down to his Swiss bank account, there is just no way to explain it.
SCHIEFFER: Okay.
DURBIN: You either get a Swiss bank account to conceal what you are doing or you believe the Swiss Franc is stronger than the American dollar.
