Freedom Line Blog

Michael Barone has a very wise piece today on why Mitt Romney may go the “white bread” route — or, as he puts it, “double vanilla” — in choosing a vice president. He focuses on Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Rob Portman, and Bob McDonnell, and I agree that all four of them would each be a solid choice.

On the extreme other side of the VP-strategery spectrum is my column today at The American Spectator online about a “Crazy Eight” of potential long-shot choices, which include a mix of ethnicities, genders, ages, and even political parties. I’ll ask you to read it for yourselves… but PLEASE note what I went to great pains to repeat, but which some readers apparently overlooked, which is that this is the first of a multi-part series I am writing on the subject, and thus amounts to a creative list of long-shot outliers, not the likely picks or the ones I think would be best. It is an illustrative list, to show the sorts of creativity Romney should use in analyzing every angle. These are not me recommendations as to who the choice should be, but they are suggestions for the sorts of people who should be on the original, very long, list under preliminary consideration. Subsequent columns will move into more likely, and probably more wise or desirable, territory (although I do think one or two of the Crazy Eight should move up the ranks at least somewhat).

For the record, I think Barone’s list is a mighty fine one.

The Daily Caller profiles a new book, Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics, that explains why aging and shrinking populations in China, Japan, and Europe will dramatically alter American foreign policy.

Some of the book’s findings are startling:

• By the end of this decade India will surpass China as the most populous nation.

• Japan will lose 1 million people a year by 2060, contracting from 127 million to less than 87 million.

• Europe’s expensive social welfare model and aging populations will increasingly spur governments to scale back military spending in order to fund burgeoning entitlement program.

• Even though America’s current rate of replacing itself gives it a demographic advantage, unless serious reforms are instituted to entitlement spending, it too will continue to cut military expenditures to pay for rapidly expanding benefits for the elderly.

India surpassing China means that democracy – not a communist-controlled autocracy – will be the government adopted by the most populous country on Earth.  It may also encourage the United States and India to forge a closer strategic partnership around shared values to check China’s ambitions.

And of course, we’ve already seen how the European model of heavy on services, light on defense is making the region – though not a few individual countries – increasingly irrelevant when it comes to making the world safe.

In his budgets, President Barack Obama has chosen to increase spending on entitlements and gut defense, arguing like a European that multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and NATO can accomplish more than any one nation.

Paul Ryan highlighted this danger in his latest budget proposal, “The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal.”  In it, he faults President Obama for cutting $500 billion from the Defense Department instead of making the changes needed to entitlements so that Americans can be protected both at home and abroad.

Americans need not accept decline through badly prioritized budgets.  Instead, using innovative entitlement reforms like the ones in Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, we can have sustainable entitlement programs and a robust defense.

We’ve got the people.  Now we need to implement the right policies.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) this morning is releasing the House GOP budget proposal.  Ryan previews his budget in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal here, and outlines the “choice of two futures” — the status quo of more debt and greater decline vs. a path to prosperity that includes less debt, lower taxes and inidividual opportunity — in the web video posted below.

Fred Barnes has a terrific column in today’s Wall Street Journal explaining the origin, structure and philosophy of Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform proposal.  The most intriguing paragraph explains how Ryan’s reform ideas went from minority alternative to majority consensus in just two years.

But House passage alone was a milestone. When Mr. Ryan first proposed premium support in 2008, 14 House Republicans signed on as co-sponsors. But when his budget cleared the House in 2011—with Medicare reform its most controversial provision—only four of the 241 Republicans voted against it. Of the 87 GOP freshmen, only one voted no. In the Senate, all but five of the 47 Republicans declined to back Mr. Ryan’s plan.

After weathering some resistance in the beginning:

Premium support is now Republican orthodoxy. But absent a GOP landslide this fall, that’s not sufficient to win congressional approval. Besides, entitlements are best enacted on a bipartisan basis. Otherwise, they may wind up like ObamaCare—unpopular, under legal challenge, and the target of endless partisan attacks.

Barnes is right that entitlement reform is best enacted on a bipartisan basis, but there’s every indication that a conservative victory this year that keeps the House and wins the Senate, supplemented with smart liberal support from the likes of Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and others, would certainly be considered bipartisan.

According to Barnes, a handful of Democrats in the Senate and House have told Ryan they are willing to go public with their support for Medicare reform after the 2012 elections.  Momentum is building for real reform of the largest deficit driver in the federal budget.  This should be a motivator for every fiscal conservative to make this election the year Ryan’s reforms become law so America can get its finances in order.

Back in December I wrote a column defending a Medicare reform proposal outlined by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).  Unlike Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” budget resolution that passed the House in 2011, Ryan-Wyden retains traditional Medicare.  However, like Ryan’s original reform, Ryan-Wyden introduces private sector competition by allowing seniors to use vouchers to select the plan – public or private – that they want, with any savings from a less expensive plan landing in the seniors’ pocket.

At the time, Ryan-Wyden was reported as an idea by two policy wonks with no discernable political support on Capitol Hill.  That changed this week when Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-NC) introduced a bill that substantially mirrors Ryan-Wyden’s Medicare-plus-competition proposal.  Although both pairings are so far quiet on the similarities between their plans, this is a good first step toward getting a common conceptual framework around an idea that increases competition.

Not that you’d know any this from reading Think Progress’ headline announcing the Coburn-Burr plan as “Two Republican Senators Try to Walk Back Paul Ryan’s Medicare Privatization Plan.”  Indeed, one has to read halfway into the article to discover that Coburn-Burr “is very similar to the bipartisan framework outlined by Ryan and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) last year and adds little to the Medicare reform debate.”

To Think Progress’ way of thinking there is little news value when two conservative Republican Senators introduce an almost identical reform plan to one announced by a liberal Democratic colleague and the most influential Republican Congressman.  Almost everyone else knows better.  With support growing for Ryan’s Medicare 2.0 reform, expect to see more movement Ryan’s way as the year rolls on.

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal draws attention to the central  failure of Republicans losing ground against a Barack Obama quietly gaining in popularity:

One mistake the party is making is fighting this race like the 2010 midterms. A certain laziness has settled in, based on the notion that the GOP can make 2012 another referendum on the president’s mismanagement. But while Obama-bashing may again fire up the conservative base, it delivers nothing to those crucial independent and middle-of-the-road voters who are anxious, confused and looking for someone to convince them they have a better plan.

Strassel goes on to explain how focus groups in battleground states are showing a consistent pattern in swing voters.  They want Republicans to make a moral case against the President and his policies.  They assume both parties will overspend.  What they want is a coherent explanation of why Obama’s policies are wrong for the country and wrong for them.  In short, what Americans want are concrete arguments explaining why Obama’s liberalism is so bad for the country, followed by an alternative vision that flows in the mainstream of American political thought and experience.

More Strassel:

Consider that ObamaCare was a concern of the focus group, though it had notably receded. This is in part because, while the GOP often complains about the law and its individual mandate, it has largely stopped explaining to voters what else is in it, or how other upcoming provisions will hurt consumers, or exactly how they grow government.

Presidential aspirants and congressional Republicans, take note: To make a moral argument against the president, you also have to make one for yourselves. To the extent the GOP is lobbing the usual Obama complaints or going to the mat over who cares more about a piddling payroll tax holiday, it is wasting time.

In a nutshell, the GOP’s messaging failure explains Paul Ryan’s success.  Almost alone among major Republican leaders, Ryan is defining the problems we face with confidence-building detail, offering thoughtful, consensus-based solutions, and justifying them in light of our history and tradition.  This is the work of a statesman.  The sooner Republicans take the hint and follow suit, the sooner America will remember the moral case for prosperity.

While responsible politicians like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) are busy proposing a bold reform of Medicare, others in Congress are engaging in less helpful behavior on the public dime.

To wit:

Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., embarked on a 24-hour hunger strike in solidarity with four Occupy DC protesters who have gone without food since Dec. 8 to advocate for D.C. voting rights.

Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in the House, met with the hunger strikers Thursday and pledged to read their declaration – which calls for full voting rights for District residents as well as legislative and budget autonomy – on the floor of the House of Representatives to enter it into the congressional record.

Not to be outdone in the brazen department, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) berated former Senate colleague and multi-millionaire Jon Corzine for his MF Global failures.  Apparently, though, there is at least one other reason for Stabenow’s outrage:

The Democratic senator who savaged Jon Corzine at a high-profile Capitol Hill hearing this week had another reason to go hard on her former colleague — she recently pressed him for campaign contributions but didn’t get any.

“She would literally call once every two or three weeks,” one Corzine intimate said of Sen. Debbie Stabenow (DMich.).

“She called all the time.”

But to no avail.

Sources in Corzine’s inner circle said they were “stunned” and “amazed” by Stabenow’s attack.

The two had served together in the Senate, but Corzine hasn’t delivered with contributions in some time.

So far this year, Corzine’s name has not appeared on Stabenow’s campaign finance reports.

Records show he last donated to her in 2006, contributing $2,000. Corzine and his then-wife, Joanne, each gave Stabenow $1,000 in 1999.

Thankfully, both Ellison and Stabenow are up for reelection next year.  Perhaps their antics will inspire some enterprising campaign lawyer to put together the first Super PAC to defeat loudmouth liberals.

How about it, Renee?

Fred Barnes has a great article in The Weekly Standard about how the trio of Republican House members his magazine first dubbed “Young Guns” back in 2007 is now perhaps the single weightiest force in Washington Republican politics. The three are Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan. “Cantor is majority leader, McCarthy is Republican whip, and Ryan is chairman of the House Budget Committee and the leading Republican voice on domestic policy,” Barnes wrote. ” [….] They knew Republicans had lost their way, ideologically and politically. And they were eager to promote House candidates from diverse backgrounds, with little or no political experience but a zeal for bold conservative reforms. ‘We focused our effort,” Cantor says, “on recruitment of people who wanted to run for the right reasons’.”

Now I haven’t always liked what Cantor, McCarthy or even Ryan have done or said, but for the most part, they (especially Ryan) have been tremendous forces for a revitalization of the GOP as a party of new ideas and bold, serious proposals.  But the key, bigger point emerges from this Barnes explanation: “[T]heir political skills were complementary: Cantor the party leader, McCarthy the strategist, and Ryan the policy thinker.” One of my biggest complaints through the years has been that far too few conservatives married practical politics well with policy expertise, and that fewer still knew how to breed those two skills together to produce something that looks good and will sell well in the public arena.

The next best thing to having one person able to do all three is to have one person who is really good at one or two of them and also wise enough to affiliate himself with the right person or people to do whichever of the other three functions at which he might be lacking.

Alas, it has been decades since we have seen a Republican presidential nominee even come close. Hence the clamor earlier this year for Ryan himself to enter the fray.

The search continues. But Barnes’ article well identifies not just the players but the troika of required skills. It’s well worth a close read.

Recently, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) delivered the keynote address after receiving the Claremont Institute’s Churchill Award for Statesmanship.  The text of his remarks are available here, with the conclusion reminding us why Ryan will likely be the first name on any GOP Vice President list next summer:

Congresses are elected to promote the common good of our country. And Congress has the power to take control of our nation’s fate, and to reclaim popular trust in government.

We face a choice of two futures in this country. But I am optimistic that if we give Americans a clear choice, they will do the right thing. As Churchill put it, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… but only after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

Look, Republicans didn’t always get it right as a party ourselves. But if there ever was a time to gather our political courage and reclaim our ideas, it is now. The country is facing a very precarious moment.

Your leaders owe you a real choice. Do you want the President’s path of debt, doubt and decline, where government goes from promoting equal opportunity to equalizing the results of our lives?

Or do you want the American idea: the opportunity society with the safety net, dedicated to liberty, equality of opportunity, and upward mobility?

It is our moral obligation, as elected representatives, to give the American people this choice.

And if we do our jobs right, then we will soon have the duty, and the privilege, to make that vision a reality.

Let it be said of us, as Churchill said of his people in their most difficult hour: “We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honored us… and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake.”

Jennifer Rubin’s interview with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) gives more reason to surmise that a pairing of him and GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney as the 2012 Republican ticket.  Rubin says that Ryan’s response to Romney’s entitlement reform plan was “effusive” and a clear statement of support from the leading elected conservative intellectual.

With Romney mired in an electoral no-man’s land – leading all other challengers but only garnering 25% support – adding Ryan to his team sometime next year would probably be enough to get disaffected Tea Party and conservative support otherwise underwhelmed with Romney’s checkered history.

Last week I wrote here about Sen. Ron Johnson’s proposals to save $1.4 trillion over ten years. Today, for the University of Mobile, I add that to proposals by Jeff Sessions, Tom Coburn, Paul Ryan and others to show that significant savings shouldn’t be all that hard.

First, Paul Ryan said he isn’t running for president in 2012.  Then, he said he wouldn’t close the door on being someone’s vice presidential running mate next year.  Now, he tells the Weekly Standard that Mitt Romney can be trusted to repeal Obamacare even though it bears a striking resemblance to Romneycare in Massachusetts.

Could it be that Ryan – perhaps like Chris Christie – is angling for a spot in the Romney veepstakes?

I’m in agreement with Quin’s sentiment, expressed below, that the Republican presidential field could have benefited from a few more entrants, especially if it was accompanied by getting rid of some of the dead weight currently in the field (at this point, I’d be happy for the debates to be four-man affairs with Romney, Perry, Gingrich, and Cain). For some perspective, imagine the lineup on stage for a debate between those who passed on the race: John Thune, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie. That’s a group that is depressingly more presidential than our current crop.

I don’t share Quin’s optimism, however that the field is going to change. Mike Pence has pretty safe odds to become the next Governor of Indiana, a prospect that’s not worth sacrificing for a long shot presidential bid out of the House of Representatives. Bobby Jindal would have engaged in something just short of electoral fraud if he jumped in the race only days after winning a second term as governor (the Iowa Caucuses will actually be held before he is even sworn in for his next term).

One factor, however, is nearly dispositive: timing. Next Monday is the filing deadline for the Florida Primary. Tuesday is the deadline in South Carolina. If we’re going to see anyone else in the field, it’s going to have to happen in the next few days. Putting together a campaign on that timeframe — particularly when most of the big donors and premium staffers have already been snatched up — is next to impossible, which means this field is almost certainly set. Like it or not, the next time you the see the candidates take the stage at a GOP debate, you’ll be looking at the future Republican presidential nominee.

The Congressional Management Foundation, a non-profit entity that rates congressional websites, gave top marks to the office portals belonging to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Mark Begich (D-AK).  Besides artistic eye appeal, one of the key elements of a superior website is the ease with which visitors can access important information.

On that score, Ryan and Begich’s websites appear to be outliers.  According to Congressional Management, “A significant number of member websites lack basic educational and transparency features and content valuable to their constituents.”  Then again, if you’ve ever encountered the ugly unhelpfulness of most government organs, you probably already knew that.

On yesterday’s Meet the Press, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) demonstrated how to reframe quickly just about any debate on taxes or the economy into one that favors free markets and opportunities for everyone:

“I don’t worry about people who are already rich. I worry about getting people to become successful,” Ryan said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Removing those barriers so that people who have never seen success before can actually become successful. … This redistribution idea of pinning people against each other does not work. It’s divisive, and it hardly gives us the kind of attitude we want for businesses to take risks so we can succeed in the future.”

Conservatives need more of this kind of rhetoric from leading politicians.  Let’s hope the eventual GOP nominee lifts Ryan’s lines to give an inspirational lift to what will surely be a withering attack on the failed Obama economy.

At the University of Mobile’s twelve23 project, I assess House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s great speech earlier this week on health care. My final note therein deserves more elaboration:

Give the health care vouchers or credits directly to consumers, and let them, not bureaucrats, search for the best deal for their individual needs.

This idea is nothing new. Back in the 1990s, several leading Democratic senators – among them Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and John Breaux of Louisiana – agreed with Republicans on a Medicare Commission appointed by President Bill Clinton on exactly this approach to the problem. Alas, when Clinton (and Congress) became embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment effort, the political well was so poisoned that the commission’s recommendations fell by the wayside.

What bears repeating is that this idea is bipartisan and nothing radical at all. Indeed, although at different spending levels, the concept was embraced (or re-embraced) as recently as last winter by Alice Rivlin, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton and later Clinton’s appointee as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. A number of other top-ranking Democratic economic-policy folks have endorsed the concept in whole or in part.

As I also noted, this is essentially the system used in the Medicare prescription drug program — an unaffordable new entitlement, but happily far less unaffordable than originally expected, precisely because competition has worked to keep down costs for taxpayers and consumers alike while providing services with which the consumers are mostly happy.

If Barack Obama wants to stop pretending to be pushing “ideas both parties agree on,” and actually accept an idea that has been bipartisan for 15 years, he would adopt Ryan’s approach. But that won’t happen. Obama isn’t for anything that takes power away from government.

Bloomberg News reports the latest ultimatum from House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to President Barack Obama:

“We await the president’s submission of the three trade agreements sitting on his desk so the House can consider them in tandem” with the aid and preference programs, Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said in a statement yesterday. “If the president submits these agreements promptly, I’m confident that all four bills can be signed into law by mid-October.”

Apart from Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget resolution and the president’s deficit reduction proposal, there may be no better example of how different is each party’s idea of sound economic policy.

Boehner wants Obama to release three trade treaties negotiated by the Bush Administration so that Americans and their counterparts in Columbia, South Korea and Panama can start enjoying the benefits of free trade.

For his part, Obama wants to force Republicans into funding another round of unemployment benefits, this time for workers displaced by the yet-to-be-ratified agreements.  That’s right: the president wants to spend money on people who may never be fired.

First of all, it’s fallacious to assume that businesses operating at historically low worker levels will fire employees; especially since increased trade opportunities are more likely to lead to hiring increases.  Moreover, Obama fails to recognize the cost of not enacting the three free trade agreements.  For instance, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that failure to ratify the agreements will cost 380,000 jobs due to missed business opportunities.

At the heart of this dispute is the focus of each party.  Boehner and the Republicans want to spur economic growth.  Obama and the Democrats want to lock-in the growth of the entitlement state.

Boehner is right to demand action on both free trade and worker aid at the same time.  If Obama cries foul, it’s only because his childish attempt to spend more and get less was called out.

Well, Paul Ryan is out of the presidential race without having entered it.  For those of us who value limited government and want to see fiscal discipline in Washington, and who desperately want a candidate who can articulate the need for and details of reforms, it is a disappointment that Rep. Ryan will not enter the race.

It does occur to me that of the candidates who are in the race, the one whose record and platform both match most closely with Ryan’s is former Sen. Rick Santorum. Far be it from me to issue any endorsement, especially considering that candidate selection involves political considerations in addition to mere analysis of records and platforms, but my prediction — as an analyst — is that Santorum will at least attempt to make a big move to attract activists who had been waiting on the sidelines to see what Ryan would do. Santorum remains a long shot, but he’s steadily creeping up in terms of public consciousness and support.

Of course, both Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann also would claim the mantle of Ryan-esque conservative reformers (although, frankly, Bachmann doesn’t fit because Ryan is an institutionalist and legislator whereas she is consciously an outsider and back-bencher), and the immediate benefit may flow to Perry as the most Ryan-like front-runner (the bandwagon effect is alive and well).  But in terms of persona, geography, personal backgrounds, style, and mastery of the substance of national issues, Santorum and Ryan are indeed a close fit.

It will be interesting to see if any other boomlet starts to try to recruit yet another candidate into the race (other than Sarah Palin, who has always been a possibility) — or, if, finally, the field (other than Palin) starts to settle down and the attention at last turns to those actually in the race rather than to those on the outside that some people wish would get in.

After months in which the shape of the Republican presidential campaign has been amorphous, the events of the past weekend have, at long last, given the GOP contest some definition. Rick Perry is in, Tim Pawlenty is out, and Michele Bachmann is walking away victorious from the Ames Straw Poll. And now, conventional wisdom is beginning to congeal around the notion that the final showdown will be a three-way race between Perry, Bachmann, and Mitt Romney.

That conventional wisdom, however, isn’t good enough for the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, as authoritative a voice as there is in the print wing of the conservative movement. In a staff editorial today analyzing the prospects of the candidates in the race, the Journal’s ed board weighs the candidates in the balance and finds them wanting. It wraps up on this brusque note:

Republicans and independents are desperate to find a candidate who can appeal across the party’s disparate factions and offer a vision of how to constrain a runaway government and revive America’s once-great private economy. If the current field isn’t up to that, perhaps someone still off the field will step in and run. Now would be the time.

There are still some major Republicans flirting with– or being courted for — a race for the White House. Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani fall into the former category, while Paul Ryan and Chris Christie are the two names most frequently cited for the latter. Will any of them get in? Those prospects probably defend on the performance of Perry, who has the chance to close down the field by filling the conservative vacuum or blow it open by becoming the second coming of Fred Thompson. To paraphrase a dictum familiar in Perry’s home state, the eyes of the party are upon him.