The VP pick of Paul Ryan makes a lot of sense for Romney. This is a base turnout election. There are few undecideds. Paul Ryan is a hero to conservatives, not a liability, and with few undecideds, I don't see how "Mediscare" is going to work (sorry to use a phrase from Eric Erickson). I know a lot of you are breaking out the champagne. After all, we've turned one blood red district in New York blue with the Paul Ryan budget, but things have changed since then. The thought of an Objectivist fanatic in the White House fills me with terror. Voter suppression and all of the GOPs dirty tricks are not for naught.
Is this good for us or bad for us? The first reaction is good for us.
It's not just about telling people that Ryan wants to end Medicare. It's about how they're going to package Ryan to the American people. The Romney camp knows what they're doing with Ryan, and his baggage is already a known quantity and the GOP knows how to deal with it. You see, he CAN make a case to end Medicare with the deficit as the boogeyman. It's time for Americans to "buckle down" and pay more of their own care. He can whip out his personal responsibility speech, saying that it'd be better if Americans paid their own way with health care. He can use the free market fairy dust to say prices with competition would go down and care would go up, and that privatizing social security will make it more sustainable in the long run. Americans DO fall for this garbage.
They're going to go on and on about how the Dems and the President have not put forward a "bold" plan to deal with the deficit. He wants to end Pell Grants and gut the social safety net, but Americans are already trained to turn against the poor and the helpless in times of trouble. Austerity can be packaged as letting the winners win and the losers lose. In many ways, Paul Ryan is the embodiment of the modern conservative movement: someone who has been in government for all their adult life, who harps on about free enterprise even though he's only been in the private sector for a few months, and is regarded by centrist and conservative journalists as having "depth" when his plan is just "kill more poor people."
I'm not saying I'm worried, it's just I'm worried :P I don't know if I trust the American people to have the good sense to know his plan is insane. It doesn't balance the budget for decades, increases military spending for no foreseeable reason, and guts protection for the most vulnerable Americans. The problem is, will Americans get that? I don't trust them to get that. It'll be easier for Obama to be the one that wants to protect the American safety net, to lower military spending, and to stand up for communitarian ideas and stability for the vast swathes of Americans who work hard, but I don't know how twisted the minds of Americans have become. Americans have stabbed themselves in the eye with a fork before, and they can do it again.