The selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate has political analysts scrambling, because they think it means Romney has decided to change the course of his election campaign in a direction favorable to Barack Obama.
They say he wanted the election to be a “referendum” on the Obama presidency’s performance. By choosing Ryan, though, they argue Romney has instead acceded to a “choice” election between two wildly different approaches to the future — which is, they say, just what Obama and his team want.
They should be careful what they wish for.
Perhaps the most intellectually impressive and tactically deft member of the House of Representatives in a generation, Ryan rose from the Republican ranks to undeniable political stardom by seizing hold of one of the most boring portfolios in Washington: the government’s budget.
Usually the politicians who swim in those deep waters either turn into backroom manipulators or get completely lost in the wonky details. Not Ryan, who both understands and can explain how fights over the budget represent the most fundamental differences between the two parties on the future direction of the country.
He made the case against the administration’s disastrous spending increases and ruinous policy direction in three dazzling confrontations with administration officials — one with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner earlier this year and two with the president himself in 2010.
In the contretemps with Geithner, Ryan grilled his fellow wonk on the administration’s failure to deal with entitlement spending until the Treasury secretary offered one of the more telling statements in recent Washington history: “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem. What we do know is, we don’t like yours.”
At the second of his discussions with the president, at a health-care summit in February 2010, Ryan questioned the notion that ObamaCare could simultaneously cover 30 million more people and cost the American people less than the current system — which openly flustered the president and cemented Ryan’s reputation as a serious and tough-minded master of policy.
Romney’s choice of Ryan suggests the Republican nominee now understands there is no real difference between a “referendum” election and a “choice” election.
Every race involving an incumbent is a referendum on his term in office. And every race involving a challenger poses a choice. The question is the same in both cases: Do you stick with the devil you know or go with the devil you don’t?
Romney seemed to be evading the “choice” part of the election by simply dwelling on the country’s current economic woes and Obama’s failed record, hopeful that would do the trick for him.
But as August began, it was Romney who found himself on the defensive, not Obama, as he dealt with a relentless Obama-friendly press hammering him over tax returns and supposedly frightful foreign gaffes — even as the media served as a transmission vehicle for wild and baseless charges that Romney was a felon and even some kind of a murderer.
The contest has devolved into a kind of trench warfare, with both candidates suffering from blows to their personal approval (Romney) and job approval (Obama) and neither gaining much, at least if you go by the two daily tracking polls (Gallup and Rasmussen).
So now the trench warfare ends and the real battles begin.
The Ryan pick sounded the trumpet: Romney is broadening his strategy to two fronts.
He has accepted the fact that the election is not only a referendum on Obama but that he must provide an unmistakable choice for the American people when it comes to the policies the White House should pursue from 2013 onward.
By picking Ryan, he has chosen the best, most honest, and most unapologetic Republican in the country to argue confidently on the key question of our time: Is the government growing too large for us to afford it?
Even Barack Obama concedes the answer is yes — that the explosion in the number of retirees coming next decade will create a colossal budgetary crisis because of the gigantic growth in the number of Americans who will be using Medicare. He claims, with a straight face that indicates he would have been a great actor, that his health-care reform will largely solve that crisis.
Ryan became famous as the designer of two budget plans, one in 2010 and the other in 2011 — the first Draconian and the second a gentler approach that took into account objections from fellow Republicans and conservatives.
The most controversial aspect of his budget is its redesign of Medicare — it will become a voucher program for workers under 55, even as it keeps everyone 55 and older in the current system. This and other proposed long-term cuts in government spending are supposedly wondrous gifts for the Obama campaign.
We are told they will allow the president to frame the choice in November between him, the nice guy who wants to give you things, and them, the mean rich guys who want to take things away.
Well, that was always going to be the Obama approach, Ryan budget or no Ryan budget, so Romney might as well have the best articulator of the case for a change in policy direction on hi`s team.
And the Ryan budgets aren’t the Romney budgets. Romney can still pick and choose among the details of the Ryan plans without being wedded to the whole package. And it will be Ryan’s job and duty, as his running mate, to go along and make the best case he can.
That’s what veep contenders do. George H.W. Bush went from being a critic of Reaganomics to an instant defender once he was tapped as the running mate. Joe Lieberman had to place his deep personal dislike of affirmative action in a blind trust when he ran with Al Gore.
And Ryan has shown his willingness to be a good partisan soldier when he voted for legislation he didn’t like in the House because the party demanded it of him.
Now Romney can now fully embrace both the referendum and the choice aspects of the election. As for Obama, he’s stuck with the choice and the choice alone. Isn’t it more valuable to be able to fight on two fronts rather than one?
jpodhoretz@gmail.com