I'm really surprised the Obama campaign is letting the Romney campaign frame the Medicare fight like this:

Now, all of a sudden, Obama is the mean man who wants to cut Medicare and Romney and Ryan are the nice young boys who want to save it. The Obama campaign has been way out front with their ads since the very beginning. They can't let Romney take the lead like this too many times between now and November. And as to the content of the ad: It's not true, according to Politifact.

The Romney campaign did not respond to our inquiry about this statement. We assume that when he said Obama cut Medicare, he was talking about the 2010 health care reform law that, among other things, reduces future Medicare spending by $500 billion.

But that’s just it — the cuts don’t come from the current Medicare budget, they put a leash on future growth and payment increases.

And after the jump is a new anti-Obama super PAC ad that takes Romney's disappointed-in-Obama theme and runs with it.

I dunno about this ad. I have a hard time believing this new-ish theory that voters need permission to vote against Barack Obama. The whole idea reminds me of the dumb theory that circulated in 2008 that voters would say while polling and talking to friends that they were pro-Obama but would secretly (and with racist intent) vote for McCain once they were in the privacy of the voting booth. It wasn't true then, and I don't think this narrative that people somehow would feel guilty about not voting for Obama is true now.