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George Will on the Ryan pick.
When, in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” a media wit at the convention supposedly exclaimed, “Good God, Goldwater is going to run as Goldwater.” When Mitt Romney decided to run with Paul Ryan, many conservatives may have thought, “Thank God, Romney is not going to run as Romney.” …
… Romney embraced Ryan after the sociopathic — indifferent to the truth — ad for Barack Obama that is meretricious about every important particular of the death from cancer of the wife of steelworker Joe Soptic. Obama’s desperate flailing about to justify four more years has sunk into such unhinged smarminess that Romney may have concluded: There is nothing Obama won’t say about me, because he has nothing to say for himself, so I will chose a running mate whose seriousness about large problems and ideas underscores what the president has become — silly and small.
He on whose behalf the Soptic ad was made used to dispense bromides deploring “the smallness of our politics” and “our preference for scoring cheap political points.” Obama’s campaign of avoidance — say anything to avoid the subject of the country’s condition — must now reckon with Ryan’s mastery of Obama’s enormous addition to decades of governmental malpractice. …
… Romney’s selection of a running mate was, in method and outcome, presidential. It underscores how little in the last four years merits that adjective.
In May James Pethokoukis wrote a Paul Ryan background piece for Commentary.
It’s probably safe to assume that no elected official in America understands the ins and outs of the labyrinthine U.S. budget the way Paul Ryan does. The 42-year-old Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the House Budget Committee has dreams of completing the small-government Reagan Revolution so that America might avoid repeating the “managed decline” of Old Europe. Ryan knows the numbers and projections and models backward and forward. He knows the strengths and weaknesses of his own arguments about reforming the EntitlementState and of those espoused by his opponents across the aisle and inside the Obama White House. He knows how the legislative process can breathe life into ambitious budget plans or, far more often, suffocate them in the cradle.
Ryan knows it all to a fine granularity. And that is not all he knows. As a veteran of the conservative movement who started out writing speeches for Jack Kemp and William J. Bennett at their joint think tank, Empower America, Ryan knows how three decades of off-and-on conservative governance in Washington have given credence to the notion that, in domestic affairs, Republicans understand how to cut taxes—and not much else. This has certainly been the case when it comes to fixing America’s social-insurance entitlements. Creating a financially sustainable safety net that does not sap America’s economic dynamism has been a political and policy puzzle, and repeated attempts to solve it have ended in economic or political disaster, or both.
Consider this: In 1983, President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill struck a deal to save Social Security through a combination of benefit cuts and tax increases. The agreement continues to be highlighted by Democrats as a model for bipartisan reform. Yet not only was Social Security not saved—the program almost immediately veered back into long-term insolvency—but several decades of surpluses in the Social Security “lockbox” were used cynically to make federal budget deficits look smaller than they were. For instance, if you don’t count “borrowings” from the Social Security trust fund, the four-year, $559 billion surplus in the late 1990s was really a two-year, $88 billion surplus. …
And just a few days before Romney’s pick, David Harsanyi wrote, “Why Not Paul Ryan?”
… So, no matter whom Republican Mitt Romney finally taps as his vice presidential nominee, Democrats will accuse this person of crimes against common decency and fairness. This person will, you can bet, be indicted as someone hellbent on “dismantling” Social Security, sacrificing Medicare to the gods of social Darwinism and “slashing” the safety net into worthless tatters.
If that’s the case, why not pick a politician who actually speaks about reforming entitlement programs in a serious way? Someone who has actually come up with some ideas that reach beyond platitude? Rep. Paul Ryan, who was spotted pushing a frail wheelchair-bound elderly woman off a cliff in a political ad last year, is really the only person on the shortlist we keep hearing about who fits the bill.
Obama strategist David Axelrod has already written that Ryan, like Romney, has “a conviction that our future will be brighter if we simply pass even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy; dramatically shift health care costs from Medicare to seniors, and walk away from our national commitments to education, research and development, and new energy technology.”
Rest assured David Axelrod is going to regurgitate the exact same nonsense no matter whom Romney picks. …
Robert Costa profiled Ryan for National Review.
… According to Romney insiders, Romney deeply appreciated Ryan’s willingness to privately share his critique of the campaign during the heated Republican primary, where Romney often struggled to make his case. As he watched from afar, long before he endorsed, Ryan drafted a series of detailed strategy and policy advisories, and discussed them with Romney over the phone. For Romney, those corporate-style memos made a lasting impression — and catapulted Ryan into Romney’s circle, where he has remained since.
“Both men are intelligent and very empirically minded, driven by facts,” says Peter Wehner, a friend of Ryan’s and a former Bush and Reagan administration official. “When he looks at Ryan, Romney probably sees somebody like himself, a person he’d want at his side in the business world or the political world. They approach complicated problems the same way.” …
Sara Murray writes an interesting piece for the WSJ on the behind the scenes of the pick logistics.
The day before Rep. Paul Ryan was introduced as Mitt Romney’s running mate, he surreptitiously walked through his backyard in Janesville, Wisc., and was smuggled, with the help of a congressional aide and a 19-year-old, to a Fairfield Inn in North Carolina.
“We wanted to try to do this very quietly and looked at maps and put it together,” said Beth Myers, the woman who coordinated Mr. Romney’s pick, recounting the tale in an airport hangar here after Mr. Ryan of Wisconsin had been named as the Republican running mate and Kid Rock’s “Born Free” had been blasted at Romney-Ryan rallies Saturday across Virginia.
She mostly got her wish. Even though plenty of aides had been briefed on the vice presidential pick — foreign policy adviser Dan Senor, senior adviser Ed Gillespie, chief strategist Stuart Stevens, campaign manager Matt Rhoades and longtime friend Bob White, among others– the news stayed under wraps until just hours before the official announcement.
Ms. Myers gleefully unraveled the events of the weekend, explaining how Mr. Ryan stole past his childhood treehouse in an a quiet escape from Janesville Friday and ultimately landed in front the U.S.S. Wisconsin in Norfolk Saturday morning, where he was announced as joining the the 2012 Republican ticket.
Getting to the moment of the surprise announcement was a long and tortured process. …