Romney-Ryan versus Obama-Biden isn’t just a choice. It is an EEG test.
After four years of failed experiments big and small — the stimulus, Solyndra, outreach to Iran — and absurd predictions such as the “recovery summer,” America is being offered a pair of serious, competent leaders who together present the chance of a clean break from the smoking ruins of the Obama years and the promise of a new beginning.
When Mitt Romney introduced Paul Ryan as his running mate, the former Massachusetts governor made a flub of the sort that means nothing, but Twitterers on the left exploded with postings.
After the GOP presidential nominee corrected himself and yielded the stage to Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman riffed off of the president’s now infamous phrase, “You didn’t build that,” the snark in 140 characters or less went silent.
The contrast was complete. Romney’s mistakes are minor and unintended. The president’s are major and quite intentional. A campaign about first principles is ahead. Either you built your business or you didn’t. Either the private sector is doing fine or it isn’t. Either the president and the Pelosi-Reid congressional Democrats are serious about cutting spending or they are not.
Which side do you think would prefer many Lincoln-Douglas debates between the president and the governor, between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan?
Not much remarked upon this weekend is the longer-term consequence of Mitt Romney’s bold selection: Whether Romney yields his leadership of the GOP in 10 weeks or eight years, his almost certain successor will be Ryan, which means another generation of serious, committed conservative leadership. The party is now firmly and wholly committed to reform. What few Old Guard remain in the committees of the Hill know their days are numbered. The party of the appropriators is truly finished.
With Ryan at his side, Romney has completely committed to a first term, indeed a first 100 days, of fully developed and sweeping reform of the entitlement state that is bankrupting the country.
Romney had already said as much and many times, but the center-right was suspicious — not so much of Romney as of the Beltway class that wears down everyone in defense of their perks and their pals.
Mitt Romney is from outside the Beltway. Ryan is in it but has never been of it. The new GOP is not fully reconstructed, but it is easily 90 percent of the way there, and just in time, for the squalor of the Democratic Party is complete, symbolized by the execrable ad run by President Obama’s Super-PAC and clearly and feloniously orchestrated by Obama’s own campaign.
It was good politics for Romney to denounce the president’s tactics in his speech introducing Ryan, and better still for for the presidential nominee to note Ryan’s commitment to our better angels.
It was reassuring to hear Ryan invoke nature and God as authors of our rights, not government, and to confirm a commitment to liberty as the organizing principle of America. It is reassuring to know that Ryan learned his way around the Beltway from Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp, men not just of excellent ideas but of enduring faith in the American experiment — a faith Romney wholly shares.
Against these ideals is arrayed a mighty army of self-interest — vast cadres of net tax-takers who know that a Romney-Ryan victory threatens their stakes.
Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are appealing to all ages and classes of voters. Ryan’s robust Catholicism also telegraphs an important message to all religious people generally and to traditional Catholics with a specific import.
The election isn’t just about economic recovery. A great deal more needs to be restored and renewed, beginning with a commitment to graciousness and high purpose, and American leadership around the world.
The president’s knee-breakers think they can persuade America that smiling Paul Ryan of the beautiful family and sincere devotion to first principles is actually Snidely Whiplash, come to evict grandma from Medicare. That cannot be done. It is like the attempt to persuade America that Mitt Romney was responsible for a stranger’s cancer and death.
If Mitt Romney is given eight years in the Oval Office, and Paul Ryan eight beyond him, the second American Century will be well and truly launched. If for whatever reason, President Obama and the Chicago gang’s scorched-earth campaign succeeds, it is hard to imagine how the country will ever recover its role in the world and in history.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
