Business

Campaigning in Chicago on Sunday, President Barack Obama took a minute to acknowledge the newest addition to the this presidential race, Mitt Romney ‘s running mate Paul Ryan . Welcoming him to the race, Obama underscored the economic ideas of the Romney/Ryan ticket, before going on to the criticize them. Deeming Ryan “the ideological leader of the Republicans in Congress,” Obama, pressing back against audience boos, said, “I want to congratulate Congressman Ryan. I know him. I welcome him to the race.” “Congressman Ryan is a decent man, he’s a family man, he’s an articulate spokesman for Gov. Romney’s vision,” he said. “But it’s a vision that I fundamentally disagree with.” Obama then went on to attack the “trickle-down fairy dust” offered by the Romney ticket and Republicans, asserting that the top-down approach doesn’t work. He further argued, per a usual talking point, that Romney would cut taxes for the wealthy while imposing a tax hike on the middle class. Take a look at the re...

In a recent conference call with reporters, Newt Gingrich claimed that President Obama is the “anti-Clinton” because while “Clinton was trying to move the party to the center…Obama has moved it to the left.” While it is amusing to hear Bill Clinton ‘s name on the favorable side of a comparison made by Gingrich, the statement was all the more remarkable because it simply isn’t true. On issue after issue, the president has positioned himself as a centrist and a pragmatist, not a left-winger: Private insurance-based health care reform; the most hawkish Democratic foreign policy in a generation; milquetoast financial reform; a refusal to push for any new gun control despite a string of mass shootings — the list goes on and on. Health care reform provides one of the more direct contrasts between the supposedly ‘centrist’ Clinton and ‘left-wing’ Obama. President Clinton’s plan involved a far larger role for government in regulating the insurance industry through plans for a National Health...