Photo credit: http://mariopiperni.com/
Romney-Ryan constitutes, very possibly, the best-looking ticket in
American political history. Mitt Romney is so textbook handsome that he
resembles a toy action-figure president. Paul Ryan's youthful, chiseled face and
piercing blue eyes are already making hearts flutter around the political world.
And no doubt Romney's bold choice for veep - which has made most people forget, for the
moment, Bain Capital and his undisclosed tax returns-- will give the Republican
presumptive nominee some pop in the polls. For the moment.
But once the excitement surrounding Ryan subsides, the long,
ideological slog of this presidential race will resume, and with greater force
than before. The stakes will be, once again, about the stark conceptual choice
that American voters now face. Romney's selection of Ryan must be seen as part
of a continuum of hard-line positions that the GOP candidate, under constant
pressure from an often hostile Right, has laid out on everything from
immigration to health care to foreign policy.
And with his veep choice Romney is sending a message to the
American electorate, more forthrightly than ever, that he won't be moving to the
middle after all. He seems to be affirming that he is just about as
ideologically conservative and as captured by the GOP base as Obama has been
painting him.
Judging from the Obama campaign's line of
attack
since his speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors last
April, this is just what the president wanted: an election that turns, to a
very great extent, on the radical nature of Paul Ryan's budget--not so much on
the numbers it lays out but on the vision it represents. The plan embodies a
fiercely pared-down, pre-New Deal (or at least pre-Eisenhower) concept of
government that the Congressional Budget Office (which analyzed the plan at
Ryan's request) concluded
would effectively eliminate, by 2050, funding for education, highways, veterans' programs, foreign aid, medical and
scientific research, national parks, food and water safety, and most programs
for low-income families and individuals other than Medicaid, as well as
partially privatize Medicare. Ryan's tax proposal would also
clearly deepen the already wide gulf in income.
Thus, this is an election that also turns on the still-lingering
question: who's really in charge in the GOP? Is it Romney or the Orthodoxicrats
of the tea party/Grover Norquist crowd? Bob Schieffer sought to tackle this question on Sunday in his
"60 Minutes" interview of the dynamic duo. "Some people are saying you are
making it [the election] a referendum on Paul Ryan's budget plan," Schieffer
asked Romney. Romney responded that "I have my budget plan, as you know, that
I've put out. And that's the budget plan that we're going to run
on."
But in fact there is no full-blown Romney budget plan, not anything
that has the operational detail of the Ryan plan. And until there is, voters
will no doubt be justified in assuming that Romney still endorses Ryan's plan as
he did last spring, when he called it "marvelous" -- which, as Obama
himself sardonically noted in his April speech, "is a word you don't often hear when it comes to
describing a budget."
Well before the veep choice was announced on Sunday, Obama had been
linking Romney directly to Ryan in a strategy that appeared to emulate Bill
Clinton's successful 1996 takedown of Bob Dole, as
I wrote in April. Just as Clinton successfully tied the center-right Kansas senator to the then-far-right
Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House, and warned voters that "Dole-Gingrich"
would cost them large parts of their Social Security and Medicare," Obama jumped
on Romney's seeming endorsement of Ryan's budget last spring.
Recall
the president's April speech: "Instead
of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right
now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the
Contract With America look like the New Deal," Obama said to laughter. "In fact,
that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the
budget 'radical' and said it would contribute to 'right-wing social
engineering.' "
For Clinton, the charges in '96 stuck not least because Dole
decided to run with a zealous supply-sider, former Rep. Jack Kemp.
Romney is as welded now to Ryan as Dole was to Kemp. Still, he does
have one big factor in his favor that Dole didn't: an economic crisis and
record-high unemployment, all of which may give him and his vision of government
the sort of validation that Dole lacked in a generally healthy economy.
Romney's
problem is that he has persistently failed to get himself over the 50 percent
mark in national polls that he needs to win. He'll have to capture at least some
of the middle to do that, including the broad mass of white, middle-class voters
who depend on Medicare and other government programs. It's not clear that Paul
Ryan, no matter how handsome and winning he may be as a personality, is the pick
who's going to do that for him.
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