Mitt Romney announced his choice for his running mate in this years presidential election. Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, is the man who will be taking the stage with Romney.
Ryan is a feisty, outspoken man, and he pulled out all the stops in a speech earlier today, accusing Obama’s team of being “more worried about their next election, than they are about the next generation.” He openly called Obama to the carpet, regarding the economic rut that the U.S. seems to be stuck in, and promised to make changes to that situation.
Ryan has a plan to rescue the federal budget, which has members on both sides of the fence agitated and curious. His plan includes stopping the defense budget cuts for next year, and making the cuts in other areas. He also plans to overhaul Medicare and Medicaid, with one of the key parts of that section being, to allow seniors to draw a government subsidized check to purchase either private health insurance, or the standard Medicaid.
Ryan says that he is willing to admit that Obama inherited a tough situation, but that in four years more should have been done to ease the pain of the struggling economy. However, rather than digging us out of the hole, Obama has increased the national debt, and increased spending. Many Republicans are angry over these policies, which make no economic sense.
To be sure, Romney and Ryan have their work cut out for them, as Obama seems intent on running a very nasty campaign this time around. Gone are the promises of clean politics from four years ago, and instead of positive advertisements, Obama has been running attacks, which border on slander, against Romney. He has accused him of not only lying about his work experience at Bain Capital, and not filing income taxes, but has even stooped as low as to accuse Romney of causing the death of Ranae Soptic, a Missouri woman, whos husband lost his job, when Bain shut down the plant he worked for.
These threats and accusations have all come to nought as Bain backed up Romney’s claim to have left in 1999, and Romney produced his income tax returns for the media. As far as the accusations regarding the woman’s death; Romney no longer worked at Bain when the factory was closed as part of a streamlining process, and the woman did have continuing health coverage from her own job.
Obama seems to realize that he has no positive platform to run on, as his record as president doesn’t offer many shining moments. Therefore, he has decided that if he can not win the vote by drawing people to him, he will attempt to win it by pushing conservatives away from Romney. If he can paint a bad enough picture of his opponent, then conservative voters will not turn out in full force, which will give him the chance to eke out a victory. It is a dirty campaign tactic, and sadly, many of the lies in the campaign ads will be believed, because researching the facts is time consuming, and most people will not take the time to do it.
It will be a tight race this year, as Romney and Ryan team up to stop Obama and Biden, however, I believe Romney has a great running mate in the charismatic congressman, and it should be interesting to see what they have to say over the next few weeks.
