I thought Mitt Romney made a strategic error in choosing Paul Ryan as a running mate. However, after listening to clips from Ryan’s campaign stops in eastern Iowa Monday and yesterday, I can see why many consider Ryan an asset to the Republican ticket.
As he’s done during his other campaign trips to Iowa, Ryan played up his family’s close connection to this state. His Dubuque event on Monday night was at Loras College, a Catholic institution his grandfather attended. He visited the home where his mother-in-law grew up in Clinton, and he was accompanied by a cousin and former state senator, Allen Borlaug.
Radio Iowa posted links to the Ryan’s stump speech from Dubuque here and the speech he delivered in Clinton here. After introducing his family and talking about their Iowa connections, Ryan spent several minutes talking about the country’s major economic problems and why President Barack Obama can’t fix those problems. I take issue with some of Ryan’s claims–for instance, saying Obama was able to enact his whole agenda, or that the stimulus made the economy worse. But I can see how Ryan spins a compelling story.
For the next several minutes, Ryan talked about why Romney is the right person to fix this economy and create jobs. Success in business is a good thing–we don’t sneer at that! Ryan also alluded to the Republican plan to improve the economy, without going into specifics. “We need to grow more things and make more things” to sell overseas. “Let’s use the energy in this country, let’s use the energy in this state to put people back to work.”
The bulk of Ryan’s stump speech focused on the national debt as a threat to the country. I couldn’t disagree more with his claims that the deficit can be fixed with spending cuts alone, or that government spending cuts will improve the economy, but he delivers the message well. He also accused Obama of planning to raise taxes on “our most successful small businesses.”
We lost 582,000 manufacturing jobs on President Obama’s watch. […] We can turn this around. […] Most of our competitors are lowering tax rates on their businesses. […] If taxing and spending and borrowing and regulating and money-printing worked, we would be entering a golden age along with Greece.
That got a laugh from the audience.
Next, Ryan briefly mentioned Romney’s plan to “repeal and replace Obamacare.” He repeated a common Republican talking point: that Obama will take $715 billion away from Medicare in order to pay for Obamacare.
Health care reform was only a brief detour in Ryan’s stump speech. He returned to fiscal problems, saying Obama has no real solution to the national debt, whereas as governor of Massachusetts, Romney reached across the aisle and balance the budget without raising taxes.
Ryan touted Romney’s plan to reform the tax code so that instead of having the government pick winners and losers, tax rates will be lowered by 20 percent while loopholes will be closed.
Ryan then bashed Obama’s foreign policy record and alleged plan to “gut” the military by cutting defense spending. He noted that maintaining a strong military is the first responsibility of the federal government. (Naturally, Ryan did not mention that defense cuts would not be looming in early 2013 if Republicans in Congress had not insisted on the Budget Control Act as a condition for raising the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011.)
Ryan portrayed Romney as the “real leader” who can fix America’s problems: saving the Olympics, creating tens of thousands of jobs in private business, working with Democrats to turn his state around.
Ryan is a better public speaker than Romney, and I think the main reason is his sense of pacing. He can milk the applause lines and laugh lines, but nearly 20 minutes into his Dubuque speech, he kept the crowd’s attention with a more quiet passage, in which he quoted Winston Churchill and Thomas Jefferson. He pointed out Catholic priests in the room, and as he talked about defending religious liberty, he gradually raised his voice and got the crowd cheering. If Obama is willing to trample on religious freedoms before the election, Ryan asked the audience, think about what he would do if he never had to face another election?
Ryan drew huge cheers with these lines, which I think put a pretty good spin on Republican “small government” philosophy:
We believe in America, because we believe in Americans. And that means, we believe the goal of government is to protect our natural rights and to promote equality of opportunity so everybody can make the most of their lives. We don’t believe that the government should be defining and regulating and dictating the terms of our rights and trying to equalize the results of our lives. We believe in freedom. And the American system of freedom and free enterprise has done more to help the poor, more to help people rise up, than any other economic system ever designed, and we don’t want to replace it. We want to revitalize it!
Finally, Ryan asked everyone in the crowd to find a friend or acquaintance who voted for Obama in 2008 but is disappointed, and encourage that person not to vote for Obama again. He said he and Romney would take responsibility and not spend the next four years blaming other people for the country’s problems. We’ll get the economy going by reapplying our country’s principles. It’s not too late to turn this around.
Ryan was gracious enough to spend a few minutes talking to the overflow crowd in Dubuque.
On Tuesday, Ryan delivered a similar speech in Clinton, then took a few questions from the audience. Later in the day, he stopped in Muscatine and Burlington. I expect to hear something along these lines during the vice-presidential debate.
“Vice President Biden just today said that the middle class over the last four years has been ‘buried,'” Ryan said. “We agree. That means we have to stop digging by electing Mitt Romney the next president of the United States.”
Ryan made his comments during an afternoon rally in Burlington.
“Of course the middle class has been buried. They’re being buried by regulations. They’re being buried by taxes. They’re being buried by borrowing,” Ryan said. “They’re being buried by the Obama Administration’s economic failures.”
Any comments about the presidential election are welcome in this thread.