By selecting Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney has made this an election about ideas, rather than a referendum on Barack Obama’s presidency. If he had wanted to play it safe – as most thought he would – he’d try to talk as little as possible about the issues and, instead, hammer Obama for his failed policies.
Such a strategy might very well have worked. Opinion poll after opinion polls shows that Obama’s approval rating is too low for him to count on reelection. First-term presidents with an approval rating of less than 50% have historically had a hard time convincing voters they’d perform better when given a second chance.
Romney, then, could have opted to simply focus on Obama’s stimulus package – that did absolutely nothing to actually stimulate the economy – and his ‘ divide and conquer’ strategies.
Instead, the leader of the Republican Party – by selecting Ryan – chose to make this an election about ideas: progressivism vs. conservatism, statism vs. the free market.
For years, Ryan has been one of the foremost, popular and influential fiscal conservative leaders in Congress. He has even written his own budget – a budget that’s as different from Obama’s spending habits as night and day. In it, he wants to cut spending dramatically, cut the size of the federal government, and lower taxes, knowing that – as Reagan put it so wonderfully years ago – the government is the problem.
Read more at MT Weekly.
