It Doesn’t Matter What Republicans Say, North Dakota Democrats Will Disagree

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Written By:
Rob Port

May 17, 2012
2:09pm

We hear a lot of griping on the campaign trail these days about how “broken” and “polarized” and “gridlocked” Washington DC is. Democrat House and Senate candidates Pam Gulleson and Heidi Heitkamp have done their fair share of it, promising to go to Washington, if elected, and change the way the country does business.

In other words, pretty much the same platform every candidate in the country campaigns on whether they’ve never served in Congress before or if they’ve been there for decades.

The question is, which of these candidates actually mean it? Earlier this week we can’t an indicator that North Dakota Democrats really don’t mean it. I posted about this a couple of days ago, but I didn’t want it to get lost in a busy news cycle because I think it’s important.

On Tuesday the 15th Pam Gulleson’s campaign sent out a press release highlighting two videos she’d posted on her website featuring women claiming that Republican reforms to Medicare – specifically the reforms suggested in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget – would have killed their loved ones and hurt them personally.

Here’s one of those videos featuring a woman named Ruth Stefonowicz:

The problem? This video of Stefonowicz isn’t new. It was released a year ago by the North Dakota Democrat party. Here’s the version they released:

What’s the big deal? Well, the Stefonowicz video was originally released to argue against the 2011 iteration of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. The budget candidate Pam Gulleson is arguing against is the 2012 iteration, which contains significant changes specifically to its Medicare reforms.

North Dakota Democrats, and Pam Gulleson’s campaign specifically, clearly didn’t even bother to read or consider the new version of Rep. Ryan’s budget. They just recycled the same things they said about the last one.

Which kind of sounds like Washington as usual, doesn’t it? And not at all like the sort of change Gulleson and Heitkamp have been talking about on the campaign trail.

So the next time you hear Gulleson or Heitkamp or one of these other Democrats talking about some awful Republican proposal that will push senior citizens off a cliff or something, ask yourself if they really even considered the proposal or if they’re just condemning it because it came from the other side.