I find this pick very disappointing. They are undoubtedly estactic at the White House. This race had a simple trajectory. To win, romney needed only to turn it into a referendum on Obama. For Obama to win, he needed first to deligitimize Romney and then make the race about competing economic policies. Obama is well on the way to succeeding with tearing down Romney. He doens;t have to change everyone's opinion, only a statistically significant chunk of independents. Now Romney has basically handed him the other half on a silver platter. All we will hear about now is the "Romney/Ryan plan to destroy Medicare" or the "Romney/Ryan plan to destory Social Security" or the "Romney/Ryan plan to raise taxes on the middle class." The counter argument is that Ryan appeals to independents, who tend to be fiscally conservative and want straight talk about getting a handle on the budget. Plus, he could bring in Wisconsin and neighboring states. I personally am not that impressed by Ryan. The guy has an obvious hair dye job, which I find bothersome right off the bat. Gingrich was right about Ryan's foolish attempt to float his medicare plan without sufficiently educating the public about the need for reform. Ryan's tax plan is full of holes. Even the basic concept of cutting deductions to lower rates is dubious to me. You can only cut minor deductions without a total political backlash. The major tax "expenditure" is employer-provided health insurance, which should be taxed as income but isn't. The only politically feasible way to take that away is to go to a single payer system, ie Obama's dream of fully socialized medicine. That's reform? Or the mortgage interest deduction? Do we really want another real estate crash? Or to kiss off the votes of everyone in the housing industry? And for what? To lower rates a little, then watch them go back up the next time the democrats are in charge? Anyway, I think it is largely moot. Unless team Romney get their act together soon, Obama can start planning his second inaugural.
Rubio would have been a much better choice. He might have drawn some Latino vote, would have gained the same conservative fence sitters Ryan will draw, and most important, wouldn't have possibly spooked the seniors (especially in FL). I think the left has a lot more fuel to work with regarding Ryan, though I personally like him. Let the scare tactics begin...wait; they are already in full swing. They will certainly intensify.
Reps have put themselves in this bizarre position. For the decades of my life (with the recent flop now that Obama is killing the enemy) they have been the hawks, the foreign adventurers, the "securers" of America's resources "accidentally" located abroad, yet at the same time they insist on very low taxes. They think this can work because this one time, when they cut taxes, revenues rose, but ignoring the fact that it was their military spending which inflated GDP. The result of those two contradictory goals? Deficits and debt have exploded, turning the country into a debtor nation. Now, a big recession comes along (the product of people gambling to secure some kind of decent retirement) and scares the shit out of people, so suddenly it's "government is too big!", completely ignoring the data which indicates we are a middling spending but low taxing country. The fear begets the Tea Party, a mass of pitiable boomers whose members (45%) will not have so much as ten grand to their name in their senior years, and who of course cannot afford tax increases, to where they should have been all along, so all they can see is spending cuts. Finally, here comes the plutocrats' accountant, Ryan, who "educates" us that the lack of currency circulating among the general population is a result of too much spending (13% of the country's budget, whoa!) on the young, the poor, the old, the sick. /rant