The Ryan Reset
Mitt Romney’s selection of the Wisconsin congressman as running mate has made the 2012 presidential race a fundamental clash of ideas about America’s future.
Mitt Romney should be grateful that party nominating conventions have not been abolished, as some commentators argue they should be. Without the Republican National Convention, Romney would have lacked a national stage on which to introduce his campaign’s greatest asset: vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.
Before this week, Romney had spent months casting November’s election as a fundamental choice between two different views of America. Yet most voters would have been hard-pressed to identify the nature of this difference. Romney’s image as a technocratic problem-solver resembled President Obama’s, and the two candidates seemed to differ on little except whether or not to raise taxes on the top 1 percent of earners. When he announced his selection of Ryan as his running mate earlier this month, Romney finally began to change that dynamic. And now that Ryan and his ideas have made it into millions of American living rooms, Romney may be poised to reconfigure the race. For the first time, American voters not only have a good sense of who Ryan is, but more importantly, what his choice as VP nominee tells us about Mitt Romney’s agenda.
Ryan has done more than any congressman to warn the United States about the unsustainability of the nation’s fiscal path. Of course, with negative real interest rates on government debt, it’s easy to dismiss this concern—and several leading economists, Paul Krugman among them, have argued that the federal government should spend even more while money remains cheap. These pundits remind me of the left-leaning economists who gave spendthrift Italy similar advice as late as 2009. We know what happened there: the market woke up to the Italian fiscal mess, and now even the most draconian budget cuts seem insufficient to fix that mess. What happened in Italy can happen here.