Ryan's Selection A Pick of Weakness
by Steve
Despite the media's best efforts to turn Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan into a game-changing event in this election, Romney was so desperate to hold onto the conservative base that he chose a man who will only ensure defeat for the GOP. The beltway media outlets want us to believe that Ryan's selection bring millions of independent voter to the GOP side, yet as Chuck Todd noted on MSNBC this morning his selection may cost Romney any chance at Florida and capturing the senior vote.
Ryan has been in Congress over a decade and has accomplished nothing. He simply hasn't shown any readiness to be commander in chief of a state or county, let alone the country. His signature achievement is a budget and tax plan that actually adds trillions in debt through more upper-bracket tax cuts while savaging middle class programs. He truly is a media creation whose presence on the ticket does nothing to help the GOP talk about jobs, because nothing in his plan does that, nor is there anything in his record or that of Romney's that demonstrates job creation success. He is a fraud on fiscal responsibility, plain and simple.
So if Romney and Ryan cannot seriously talk about job creation, cannot seriously talk about fiscal responsibility, cannot seriously talk about tax fairness, and cannot sell their spending cuts to finance more tax breaks for the wealthy, then what exactly does Ryan's selection actually do to help the GOP win? Zip. Nada.
No matter; the political media will keep talking about Ryan in glowing terms while they ignore his actual record and what he actually proposes. They don't have the guts to admit that Romney picked Ryan out of weakness, nothing more.
This election was supposed to be about jobs, and Barack Obama's alleged failure at producing them in the face of a clearly obstructionist GOP congress. Yet by picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney did nothing to further any jobs argument, and only ensured that the debate will now be on fiscal priorities and tax fairness, turf more beneficial to Obama. Worse, by adding Ryan to the ticket, Obama can now fully tie Romney to the do-nothing GOP congress. A recent poll shows that Congress is loathed by vast majorities of senior voters, who expressed a strong desire for bipartisan solutions that would strengthen both Social Security and Medicare. Yet Romney picked the one man who is the poster child for turning Medicare into a voucher program, raising anxiety rather than lowering it. Obama can now spend the next two months drilling Romney and Ryan for the do-nothing GOP Congress and their support for undermining the exact things that large blocks of voters want strengthened. Obama is starting that today in Iowa, where he will gleefully blame Ryan for the stalled farm bill. Romney and Ryan better get used to that: it'll be this way for the rest of the campaign.