Obama Shifts Focus to Students from Seniors
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- President Barack Obama's campaign broke Tuesday from Medicare attacks to court a familiar voting bloc: students.
In an ad targeted at students who take on financial burdens to attend universities, the Obama campaign claimed Mitt Romney's plan would cut college aid for nearly 10 million students.
But Romney's Web site says very little about college aid, and it appears the Obama claim is rooted in vice presidential hopeful Paul Ryan's budget plan. Ryan suggested in his Path to Prosperity proposal that federal higher education programs need to be reformed.
"Economists ... point out that the decisions of colleges and universities to raise their prices would have been constrained if the federal government had not stepped in so often to subsidize rising tuitions," Ryan wrote in his budget plan.
Romney has stated on his Web site that college must be affordable and available to students.
The Obama campaign has largely focused its efforts on seniors and Medicare since Romney chose Ryan as his running mate. The shift from jobs and the economy is a welcome change of message for the Obama campaign, which has struggled to shake off the criticisms about thesluggish domestic economy.
Voters aged 18 to 29 voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008 -- exit polls showed nearly 70% in favor of the president -- which was 20 percentage points better than Sen. John Kerry fared in 2004.
Though the 18-to-29 demographic won't necessarily turn out as well as it did in 2008, the Obama campaign does seem intent on turning the focus -- at least for now -- to issues that don't reflect on the past four years' lethargic economic growth.
-- Written by Joe Deaux in New York.
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