It’s Monday, August 13th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Yes, it’s finally beginning to feel like the fight’s on:

We kick off the week with three looks at….

The Ryan Choice

Romney selects a leader of the GOP’s reform wing.

 

When these columns asked last week “Why Not Paul Ryan?”, we had no idea that Mitt Romney would choose the Wisconsin Congressman as his running mate. So much the better if he had already made up his mind. In choosing the 42-year-old, Mr. Romney has embraced the GOP’s reform wing and made it more likely that the election debate will be as substantial as America’s current problems.

Vice Presidential choices rarely sway electoral outcomes, but they do reveal something about the men who make the choices. As Mr. Romney’s first Presidential-level decision, the selection speaks well of his governing potential. He broke free of the stereotype that he is a cautious technocrat by picking Mr. Ryan, a man who has offered reforms that the country needs but are feared by the GOP’s consultant class and much of his own party.

Mr. Romney is signaling that he realizes he needs a mandate if he is elected, which means putting his reform ideas before the American people for a clear endorsement. He is treating the public like grown-ups, in contrast to President Obama’s focus on divisive and personal character attacks.

The Ryan choice also suggests that Mr. Romney understands that to defeat Mr. Obama he’ll have to do more than highlight the President’s economic failures. He must also show Americans that he has a tangible, specific reform agenda that will produce faster growth and rising incomes.

Mr. Ryan is well equipped to help him promote such an agenda. The seven-term Congressman grew up in the GOP’s growth wing and supply-side ranks as a protege of Jack Kemp. Far from being a typical House Republican, he was a dissenter from the Tom DeLay do-little Congress in the last decade. He began talking about his reform blueprint in the George W. Bush years when everyone said he was committing political suicide.

Ignored in 2008, his agenda began to look prescient in 2010 as Mr. Obama’s policies produced persistently high unemployment, the slowest recovery in decades, and exploding, unsustainable debt. In 2011, Mr. Ryan won the battle inside the House GOP to take on entitlements, including Medicare. The budget showed the courage of Republican reform convictions and helped smoke out Mr. Obama’s insincerity on spending cuts and budget reform.

Democrats and media liberals also claim to be thrilled with the choice, boasting that they can now nationalize the election around the Ryan budget. But behind that bluster you can also detect some trepidation. In Mr. Ryan, they face a conservative advocate who knows the facts and philosophy of his arguments. He is well-liked and makes his case with a cheerful sincerity that can’t easily be caricatured as extreme. He carries his swing Wisconsin district easily though it often supports Democrats for President.

This may be why, in his meetings with House Republicans, Mr. Obama has always shied away from directly debating Mr. Ryan on health care and spending. He changed the subject or moved on to someone else. The President knows that Mr. Ryan knows more about the budget and taxes than he does, and that the young Republican can argue the issues in equally moral terms.

Democrats will nonetheless roll out their usual attack lines, and the Romney campaign will have to be more prepared for them than they were for the Bain Capital assault. There’s no excuse in particular for letting the White House claim that Mr. Ryan would “end Medicare as we know it” because that is demonstrably false.

Late last year, Mr. Ryan joined Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden in introducing a version of his reform that explicitly retains Medicare as we know it as a continuing option. The reform difference is that seniors would for the first time also have a choice of government-funded private insurance options. The Wyden-Ryan bet is that the choices resulting from private competition will be both cheaper and better.

This “premium-support” model has a long bipartisan pedigree and was endorsed by Democratic Senators John Breaux and Bob Kerrey as part of Bill Clinton’s Medicare commission in 1999. Wyden-Ryan is roughly the version of reform that Mr. Romney endorsed earlier this year.

Our advice is that Mr. Romney go on offense on Medicare. He could hit Mr. Obama with ads in Florida and elsewhere for his $716 billion in Medicare cuts, and his plan to cut even more with an unelected rationing board whose decisions under ObamaCare have no legislative or judicial review. Then finish the ads with a positive pitch for the Romney-Ryan-Wyden reform for more patient and medical choice.

In his remarks on Saturday in Norfolk, Mr. Ryan also hit on what is likely to be an emerging Romney theme: leadership that tells Americans the truth. “We will honor you, our fellow citizens, by giving you the right and opportunity to make the choice,” he said. “What kind of country do we want to have? What kind of people do we want to be?”

The underlying assumption is that at this moment of declining real incomes and national self-doubt, Americans won’t fall for the same old easy demagoguery. They want to hear serious ideas debated seriously. The contrast couldn’t be greater with a President who won’t run on his record and has offered not a single idea for a second term.

In choosing Mr. Ryan, Mr. Romney is betting that Americans know how much trouble their country is in, and that they will reward the candidate who pays them the compliment of offering solutions that match the magnitude of the problems.

Next up, in second commentary courtesy of the WSJ, Kimberly Strassel offers her insight as to….

Why Romney Chose Ryan

His running mate offers Romney the opportunity to explain to Americans that they have a choice between national stagnation and renewal.

 

Mitt Romney did much more this weekend than announce a running mate. He unveiled a significant change in strategy. The 2012 election is now a choice, not just a referendum.

Conservatives have spent much of this summer reassuring themselves. They’ve pointed out the extraordinary sums President Obama has thrown at crippling Mr. Romney. They’ve noted how ugly and brutal those attacks have been. They’ve comforted themselves that, for all the smears, Mr. Romney is within a few points of the incumbent in national tracking polls.

Yet the same can be said on the other side. The economy is teetering, the deficit exploding, the nation unhappy with his signature legislation. Daily, Mr. Romney beats the White House with these failures. But he has barely moved the polling dial.

Mr. Romney’s choice of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, one of the party’s star reformers, is an attempt to break out of the stalemate, change the dynamic. It was foremost a shrewd acknowledgment on Mr. Romney’s part that his path to the White House is going to take more than pointing out the obvious. He needs to run on bold ideas, as Mr. Ryan has, and convince Americans those ideas are the way to prosperity.

In fairness, the Romney campaign had the elements in place. It’s taken some time, but Mr. Romney today is sporting a fairly bold reform agenda, from his tax cuts to his Medicare reforms, to his vow to end ObamaCare. And the candidate has been dutifully repeating that this election is a choice between two very different futures for the country. Yet his policy and his words were largely lost amid his campaign’s intense focus on the president.

Mr. Ryan provides the crucial shift in emphasis, the opportunity to go on offense. We will now have a focus on, and explanation of, the choice between stagnation and renewal. This is what Mr. Ryan excels at—not just crafting ideas, but explaining them in a positive and serious way. This ability is why the congressman—despite his supposedly extremist reform blueprint and budget (says the left)—has continued to win a district that in 2010 went for Mr. Obama.

Mr. Romney is well aware of those skills. The two men have been carrying on a conversation for some time. Even before he endorsed Mr. Romney in March, Mr. Ryan had been sending Mr. Romney memos on policy and strategy; they called each other, discussed tough issues like Medicare reform.

Indeed, while the congressman will publicly aid the campaign by barnstorming in Ohio or Florida, he’ll be privately aiding it as a voice in the inner circle—relating his own long experience with how to tackle and win the toughest issues. The Ryan pick will reassure the GOP base, but the goal here is to use the reboot to win the crucial argument with independents and Reagan Democrats—as Mr. Ryan has done so well back in his home state of Wisconsin.

The first pitch to those voters came with Mr. Romney’s introduction of Mr. Ryan on Saturday, in which the campaign made clear it intends to use this pick as a way of underlining the intellectual poverty of the Obama campaign. Mr. Romney spoke of Mr. Ryan’s “integrity,” his “seriousness,” his “intellectual leadership,” and his refusal to “demonize his opponents”—traits for which Mr. Ryan is well-known.

The introduction was designed to highlight the Obama campaign’s own relentless smear attacks, and its focus on the trivial. This is the first sign of Mr. Ryan’s influence, since the strategy is clearly modeled on the congressman’s own history of winning on ideas against opponents who resort to cheap attack.

Democrats will attack anyway. To their disappointment, Mr. Ryan is a well-vetted, 14-year congressman, and a bit of a Boy Scout. There will be no fruitful dumpster-diving, a la Sarah Palin. Instead they are bragging about a 290-page Ryan opposition research paper from the left-wing super PAC American Bridge that focuses on the congressman’s plan to reform Medicare to offer a “premium support” option—a proposal he crafted with Oregon’s Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. That plan would for the first time give seniors who want it the choice of government-funded private insurance options. The attacks will include the usual hysteria that Messrs. Romney and Ryan want to euthanize senior citizens.

Mr. Obama has taken to claiming that Mr. Romney wants to raise taxes on the middle-class so that he can give that money to the 1%. Expect the president and his party to now claim that the Romney-Ryan ticket doesn’t just want to throw granny off the cliff; they want to dispense her Medicare dollars to their fat-cat friends.

You forgot killing off children, dogs and the elderly….oh, and ending Medicare as we know it!

Mr. Romney’s only possible response is to go nuclear. His campaign has been timid in its response to the Obama attacks on Bain and Mr. Romney’s wealth. But if the Romney campaign leaves hanging the Obama argument that it is ending Medicare or redistributing tax dollars to the wealthy or denying Americans health care, it will lose.

If Mr. Romney wants to know the perils of adopting Mr. Ryan in name but not in spirit, he need only look at a handful of special House elections over the past years. Those contests featured GOP candidates happy to burnish their conservative credentials by initially supporting Mr. Ryan’s budget reforms. Yet when the Democratic attacks rolled in, they ducked the debate. Voters were left with little choice but to believe the left-wing spin, and the Republicans lost.

There’s another reason the candidate needs to forcefully defend his running mate. Mr. Romney’s pick is considered bold in part because Mr. Ryan’s reforms have in many ways outpaced his own. Democrats, aided by a willing press, are going to be looking for any daylight between the running mates and attempt to spin those perceived cracks into a story line about a fractious, divided ticket. That’s the sort of messy sideshow that can swamp a campaign.

The Ryan pick is the boldest move Mr. Romney has made as a presidential candidate—in this campaign, or his last. If he wants to win the White House, it needs to be just the beginning.

Lastly, one of our favorites, John Podhoretz, writing at CommentaryMagazine.com, offers the view from the Dark Side, detailing:

Paul Ryan and Liberal Glee

 

The selection of Paul Ryan has been greeted with a wild joy on Twitter, and not just by conservatives; I’ve seen hundreds of liberals celebrate the choice. A spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Jesse Ferguson, said this: “So this is what xmas morning feels like?” The idea here is that Ryan is the perfect target for Democrats because he has proposed specific budget cuts and the overhaul of Medicare, while supporting tax reform that would lower rates on the wealthy.

Doubtless, Ryan has provided some subject matter for Democratic attacks. But so, in different ways, would anyone else on Mitt Romney’s short list. Romney already opened himself up to assault on the Ryan budget by calling it “marvelous,” and it’s not as though the Obama campaign was going to stand on scruple and let him go on that because he hadn’t formally adopted it.

The other two exciting possibilities on the Romney list, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie, are arguably more dynamic than Ryan—Rubio is probably the best speaker in the GOP, and Christie the master of the viral—but they too would have been put in the position of actually having to defend the supposedly draconian Ryan budget the Democrats were and are going to hang around the Romney campaign’s neck. And they would have been worse at it, obviously.

More important is the quality of the glee itself. It’s an ongoing liberal political-character flaw. So insulated a are many, if not most, American liberals that they simply presume that which they despise is inherently despicable, and that what they fear is inherently fearful. As they gather in their echo chamber, all they hear are voices resounding with the monstrousness of redesigning Medicare and the parlousness of cutting the federal budget. They genuinely do not know that budget cutting is popular, even if only in theory, and that tens of millions of voters do understand the notion that the government is living far beyond its means. From what we can gather, in fact, these are exactly the sorts of ideas that speak to independent voters and have since the days of Ross Perot.

Ryan is a formidable presence in American politics. Generally speaking, formidable players do formidable things. The glee of the Left suggests its folk are so excited by what the Obama campaign can dish out that they are unprepared for what Ryan and Romney can dish out right back.

Beyond his party affiliation, skin color and bagging bin Laden, The Obamao hasn’t anything to recommend him for a second term; not a single positive approach, accomplishment or attribute.  America’s foreign policy and domestic economy are imploding, unemployment and oil prices continue to rise as our own government purposely attempts to destroy America’s domestic energy production; the only upside we can glean from Tick-Tock’s time in office is he’s well-rested, Michelle and the kids have seen the world (on our nickel) and his golf game’s improved.

Running a campaign of outright lies, half-truths and deliberate misrepresentations is all they left.  Let’s be honest: were Obama either (a) a Republican, or (b) White, he’d be the first sitting President since Franklin Pierce denied his party’s nomination.

But far too many individuals and special interest groups, the MSM first and foremost, have much too much invested in The Obamao to let him go gently into that good night; and they’ll rage, rage against the dying of his blight.

So, as the great Bette Davis so famously said….

….and a very, VERY ugly one at that.

Since we’re on the subject of a campaign composed of outright lies, half-truths and deliberate misrepresentations, Douglas McKinnon, courtesy of Investors.com and Bill Magruder, believes, at least for The Dear Misleader, the worst is yet to come:

Barack Obama Runs On Empty And Toward Defeat

 

The social experiment that was Barack Obama’s election and presidency is over. Way over.

As one who was born in the heart of Boston and worked the political world of Washington for 20 years, I know quite a few Democrats. Some are family, and many are close friends. Most voted for Obama in 2008. None at this point is inclined to vote for him in 2012.

Why? Because they view him as an abject failure across the board and have decided to put the welfare of their families and themselves before the empty rhetoric of the Obama campaign before it’s too late.

Because of my time in Washington and past positions there, I also know and am friends with quite a few journalists. I speak with many on a regular basis, and it’s safe to say that the majority of them lean left politically. That said, in off-the-record conversations with my left-leaning journalistic friends, not one believes Obama is going to win re-election. Not one. While most believe Mitt Romney to be a weak candidate, they are still convinced that he will comfortably defeat Obama on Nov. 6.

These liberal and jaded journalists privately admit that Obama has been exposed for what he is: an overhyped, self-invented candidate with no real-world experience who has been frozen into inaction by the enormity of the office he holds.

Obama has no domestic policy to speak of. He has no foreign policy to speak of. He has no jobs program to speak of. His signature health care plan is driving doctors out of the field, crippling small businesses and putting thousands of Americans out of work.

The Obama of 2012 has nothing positive to run on. Nothing. And guess what? He, more than anyone else in his White House or campaign, knows it. He knows his election and presidency were social engineering gone wrong. He knows his biography is unraveling faster than the baseball that Roy Hobbs crushed into the rain in the movie “The Natural.” He knows that he has run out of all options but one: Go negative on Mitt Romney 24/7 and hope a heretofore compromised mainstream media will once again unethically act as his surrogate.

Unfortunately for Obama, two massive holes exist in his “demonize Romney with an assist from the media” campaign tactic. First, most Americans who are paying attention to this contest have come to the conclusion that Romney is a very decent and moral person who does have a fairly impressive business background coupled with some other real-world experience.

Second, as mentioned above, more and more members of the Journalists In The Tank For Obama club seem to be having second thoughts. As one of my friends in that club said, “Hey, we have kids in school, have to pay mortgages and want to keep our jobs just like everyone else.”

In 2008, Obama won a fairly impressive victory against an incredibly weak and inept Republican challenger. To pull off that victory, Obama had pull a significant number of Republican and independent voters away from John McCain. To his credit and to his ability to spin himself along with the American voters’ sense of fairness and history, Obama did just that.

In 2008, Obama was an unformed piece of pottery clay molded into shape by his own false rhetoric combined with a media narrative that sought to canonize him in anticipation of having his face carved into Mount Rushmore.

Today, in 2012, Barack Obama stands on his own — an unqualified man who did not have the gifts to grow into the presidency. While noble in many respects, (Though we’re at a loss to think of even one!) the social experiment that was Barack Obama’s election and presidency is coming to its natural and expected conclusion.

We hope to Heaven (quite literally) McKinnon’s right; yet the fact remains, we’re playing against a stacked deck.  It’s rare we agree with Bill O’Reilly, but he’s spot on when he says come November 7th, the MSM’s blatant Obama bias may well be worth 4% at the polls.  Coupled with the innumerable illegal voting scams at which Dimocrats excel (one of which allowed Al Franken to provide the 60th vote for Obamascare), Romney will need more than the usual margin for victory.

In a related item forwarded by Speed Mach, Mona Charen, writing at RealClearPolitics.com, relates why she believes B. Hussein is….

Unfit to Govern

 

Which is exactly what the Founding Fathers, as exemplified in this quote from James Madison, envisioned:

“The citizens of the U.S. are responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society.“

The only question is whether enough of us are up to the task.

And which is why, as this next item from Conn Carroll and the Morning Examiner details, the Left is so keen on replacing the conclusion of our current Pledge of Allegiance with a version all their own:

With welfare and bailouts for all

 

He just can’t help himself. Yesterday in Pueblo, Colorado, President Obama told a cheering crowd:

I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.

Obama says he wants to do the same thing he did for the auto industry for every industry? That’s his plan?

First of all, General Motors and the U.S. manufacturing sector is not as hot as Obama thinks it is. GM’s profits fell 41 percent last quarter and U.S. manufacturing shrank for the second straight month in July.

But turning back to Obama’s bailouts, he ended up spending $80 billion on General Motors and Chrysler and both companies ended up declaring bankruptcy anyway. His administration then interfered with the bankruptcy process of both companies, undermining the rule of law and making it more expensive for every other distressed company in America to survive financially.

Throughout the White House-led bankruptcy process, Obama repeatedly favored his union campaign contributors while shortchanging non-union employees. These interventions did not come cheap. A non-partisan independent study found that Obama’s interference with the rule of law cost taxpayers $26.5 billion. In other words, if Obama had not interfered with the bankruptcy process, taxpayers would have gained $3.5 billion on the auto bailout, instead of losing $23 billion.

And now Obama wants to bring this “success” to every other industry in America? We can’t afford it.

Obama’s stimulus already got rid of the work requirements for food stamps. His administration is even running radio ads asking more Americans to sign up for the program. That’s right: Obama is openly advocating for increasing American dependency. And last month, his Health and Human Services Department invited states to stop enforcing all welfare requirements entirely.

Do Americans really want more people dependent on welfare and more government owned companies? Because that seems to be Obama’s 2012 campaign platform.

Meanwhile, as this parody from the RNC accurately asserts:

….not to mention one helluva lot more for gas:

And in today’s Muslim Minute, a brief word on the Mad Mullahs nuclear goals from a source far more reliable than Harry Reid’s:

Iran’s nuclear program designed to ‘finish off’ Israel, Hezbollah MP says

The entire equation in the Middle East will change, Walid Sakariya tells al-Manar TV

 

Remember, this is a regime Team Tick-Tock has coddled since it took office.  It betrayed the Green Revolution of June, 2009, and has recently been revealed to be conducting secret negotiations based on us once again taking Tehran at its word.  Seriously….if YOU were Israel, would you be waiting for us?!?

On the Lighter Side….

And in the Medical Section, an amazing scientific breakthrough which guarantees Sandra Fluke a little bit of overtime:

Study: Oral Sex Cures Morning Sickness

 

Pregnant women have used natural remedies such as a teaspoon of ginger or a mint to help battle morning sickness. But now, one medical professional believes you can add oral sex to that list. According to Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at SUNY-Albany, the best way to cure morning sickness during pregnancy is sperm. But not just any sperm, it should be the sperm of the person who got you pregnant.

Gallup believes the reason a pregnant woman gets morning sickness is due to the unfamiliar semen in their body due to the pregnancy. Gallup says in his findings that the woman’s body will initially reject the father’s semen as an infection and react to it by vomiting. Gallup says the best cure for morning sickness is to ingest the father’s semen so her body can build up a tolerance to what’s already in her body.

Gallup agrees with the 2000 abstract from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which showed that oral sex and swallowing sperm is correlated with a diminished occurrence of preeclampsia. PubMed Health defines preeclampsia as when a pregnant woman develops high blood pressure and protein in the urine after the 20th week, which is usually in the late second or third trimester of pregnancy.

Finally, we’ll call it a day with the Sports Section, and proof positive no matter the name, a thug is still a thug:

Dolphins receiver Chad Johnson arrested on domestic violence charge

 

‘Fins fans must be every bit as impressed by their Front Office’s acumen as the Seahawks faithful.  Cero-cero is more like it….both his name and moral IQ.

Magoo