At the Republican Convention, featured roles are handed to non-Ryans
who would have brought other qualities to Romney’s ticket: New Jersey Gov.
Chris Christie, with his street-fighter style, will deliver the keynote, and
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will introduce Romney.
Instead of scaring the elderly with Ryan Social Security and Medicare
threats, Rubio would have appealed to Hispanic voters and helped carry his own
state, which houses so many of both.
The question here is less whether Romney has politically suicidal
instincts but whether, from his sheltered tax-haven life, he has any at all. He
goes from one step to the next, with no apparent awareness that there is any
connection.
Abortion? Gay rights? Ryan? Christie? Rubio? Romney sees politics as an
endless Chinese menu. Order one now, and have the others later.
Or all at the same time. As he chooses Ryan, Romney takes on a new “senior adviser,” a Karl Rove protégé who denounced Ryan’s Social Security fixes during
the Bush years:
“(A)small number of conservatives...prefer to push only for investment
accounts and make no effort to adjust benefits--therefore making no effort to
address this fundamental structural problem. In my judgment, that's a bad idea.
We simply cannot solve the Social Security problem with Personal Retirement
Accounts alone. If the goal is permanent solvency and sustainability...Personal
Retirements Accounts, for all their virtues, are insufficient to that task.”
But not to worry. In Romneyworld, they will find others to go in the
opposition direction and back Ryan.
It’s one approach to running a three-month political campaign, but it
would be a hell of way to run a country for four years.
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