Barack Obama had Paul Ryan on his radar years before
Mitt Romney selected the representative from Wisconsin as his running mate.
Ryan, the president said, favors "thinly veiled social Darwinism."
Further, Obama charged that Ryan dishonestly claims
the mantle of deficit hawk when he actually votes for budget-busters as long as
they come from his party.
And Team Obama's response to the House Budget
Committee Chairman's elevation to potential VP made clear that the Democrat's
campaign won't overhaul so much as go into overdrive. Aides argue that Ryan
amplifies rather than challenges their core message with just 88 days until the
election
The early attacks are telling: Obama's website
repeatedly refers to Ryan's "extreme
budget plan" as favoring the rich over the middle class (the
president's core argument against Romney). The first line of its
biographical sketch reads "Paul Ryan is a career Washington D.C.
insider." (Obama has been running in large part against inside-the-Beltway
political stalemate, casting the blame on Republicans.)
In an attack everyone in politics saw coming, the
site warns Ryan's budget "would turn Medicare into a voucher program,
increasing seniors' costs by up to $6,350 per year"—an unusually precise
figure seemingly tailored to shock elderly voters in pivotal battlegrounds like
Florida, even though his proposal would not affect people currently over 55.
The site also highlights Ryan's opposition to
abortion and his vote against legislation aimed at erasing pay discrimination
against women. (Obama is counting on his "gender gap" advantage over
Romney in November.)
The president tweeted
a link to the new content to his 18.4 million followers.
Team Obama hopes that these arguments will be enough
to reassemble key parts of the coalition that powered his historic 2008 victory
while limiting the political damage from the president's sorest vulnerability:
An economy still sputtering and weighed down by high unemployment three and a
half years after he took office.
The president, who was due to fly home to Chicago for
some fundraising before a three-day bus tour in Iowa starting Monday, kept mum
after the announcement. But campaign manager Jim Messina hit all of the same
notes in a statement emailed to reporters.
Ryan, like Romney, favors "the flawed theory
that new budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while placing greater burdens
on the middle class and seniors, will somehow deliver a stronger economy."
The Republicans would "end Medicare as we know
it." And "Ryan rubber-stamped the reckless Bush economic policies
that exploded our deficit and crashed our economy. Now the Romney-Ryan
ticket would take us back by repeating the same, catastrophic mistakes,"
he said.
Behind the scenes, Democrats urged reporters to
consider that Ryan voted for the Bush-era tax cuts (which Obama renewed in late
2010) and the war in Iraq—both policies that swelled the deficit.
And they also underlined that Ryan voted (with many
Democrats) to bail out big banks threatened in the 2007-2008 global financial
meltdown and also supported the auto industry bailout. Those policies are
frequent targets of conservative hatred—but there's no sign that this will dent
their support for Ryan. In fact, the Tea Party Express group cheered the
choice.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said
it was targeting "70 vulnerable House Republicans" with the message
that Ryan's plan "ends Medicare." That's a reference to Ryan's plan
to transform the hugely popular health care program for the elderly into a
voucher-like system as part of an effort to contain its swelling costs. It's an
argument that Obama himself has essentially been making for months—as recently
as the
July 19 event in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Even in a campaign that has seen Obama and Romney
each try to portray the other as History's Greatest Monster (as The Simpsons
once dubbed Jimmy Carter,) some of Obama's past clashes with Ryan have had
something of a personal tone.
In April 2011, Obama was caught on tape blasting Ryan
to donors. In remarks reported by CBS Radio News White House Correspondent Mark
Knoller, Obama charged that Ryan was "not
on the level" when it came to cutting the deficit.
"This is the same guy that voted for two wars
that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted
for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill—but
wasn't paid for," Obama said. (Ryan's response: "Rather than building
bridges, he's poisoning wells.")
One year later, Obama charged at an Associated Press
luncheon that Ryan's budget amounted to "thinly
veiled Social Darwinism." (Ryan's response: Obama "has
chosen to distort the truth and divide Americans in order to distract from his
failed record.")
But for his part, Ryan is no stranger to leading
Republican attacks on Obama—his main role as vice presidential nominee and one
he has played with relish since the administration's first year. In late
2009, Ryan predicted that defeating the Democrat's health care overhaul would
mean "a failed presidency" that had to negotiate with Republicans.
That might make debating Vice President Joe
Biden—some three decades senior to the 42-year-old lawmaker—a bit of a letdown.
Biden's strategy? Maybe this could be a preview: Biden
calls Ryan "a fine guy."
"He's a bright, handsome guy from the state of
Wisconsin. He a fine guy," Biden went on. "But I think his ideas are
not nearly as fine as he is a man."
