Paul Ryan has suddenly made Bain Capital B-material — and signaled, finally, that Mitt Romney is ready to fight.
Until Saturday morning, I was set to write about the rising unrest among Romney’s big Wall Street and business-community donors about Romney’s failure to counter the main thrust of President Obama’s re-election effort: distortions and outright lies over Romney’s time as head of private equity firm Bain Capital that sought to portray him as a greedy Robber Baron.
It didn’t matter that the attacks were mostly wrong — that, though Bain under Romney invested in some clinkers that failed, the firm actually helped grow far more successful jobs creating companies, like Staples and The Sports Authority chain.
Romney’s business-community backers fretted that their candidate wasn’t up to the task, and the country would have to endure four more years of Obamanomics with its constant attacks on wealth creators crippling taxes, massive deficits and persistently high unemployment.
But naming Paul Ryan as his running mate is a game changer. The pick signals that Romney was listening to his critics and is now ready to fight — not necessarily over how many jobs he created at Bain and how many steel mills he didn’t close, but over how best to repair the damage Obama has done to the once-mighty US economy.
And what a fight it will be. Lawmakers are rarely idea men, yet Paul Ryan is right there at the intellectual heart of the conservative movement. He has boldly offered plans to address the country’s massive deficits, the slide toward a European-style debt disaster and our absolute need to grow our economy out of its current malaise.
Yes, Ryan has argued that we not only need to reform our jobs-killing tax code, but also to rethink increasingly unaffordable entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. For decades, that’s been third-rail stuff — but if we don’t do it now, the problems will only fester until we face a Greece-like fiscal disaster.
This approach — until Saturday only gingerly supported by the Romney campaign — is distinctly different from the point of view of President Obama and the entire Liberal establishment (including the mainstream media), who believe that our salvation lies in an ever-bigger government, even as evidence abounds (particularly in Europe) that such an economic agenda doesn’t work.
What’s so appealing about Ryan is that he hasn’t shied away from a fight with the Left and has become a lightning rod for it.
Democrats are said to be relishing a fight over Ryan’s reforms, which they’ll portray as tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts at the expense of the poor. I’m sure they’re even dusting off that now-infamous ad where a Ryan lookalike throws an elderly woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. The new ad will feature Ryan and Romney doing the dirty deed.
I put nothing past the Obama slime machine. But this is a fight that Romney should relish, particularly with Ryan at his side.
Ryan counts as his mentors the late Jack Kemp, the Buffalo congressman who was among the leading architects of President Ronald Reagan’s economic plan that led to years of uninterrupted growth.
And while Reagan and Kemp were plenty tough in attacking the folly of the left — the idea that somehow a bigger and bigger government could improve people’s lives more than private initiative and economic growth — they did it in an optimistic way.
They stressed that the only obstacle to growing the US economy out of the malaise of the 1970s were the wacky economic policies of the left. And they won, both the election and the policy debate, and gave us tax cuts, deregulation and years of economic growth.
Ryan brings that Reagan-Kemp optimism to Romney’s campaign. So, no matter how many granny-over-the-cliff commercials you see, there will now be a lively policy debate over the future of the country.
It wasn’t the safe choice; Romney and Ryan might lose — but they’ll fight the good fight, and that ain’t a bad thing.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.