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Jewish World Review April 7, 2012/ 15 Nissan, 5772 Romney veep pick? A heavy hitter By George Will
JewishWorldReview.com |
Barack Obama's intellectual sociopathy -- his often
breezy and sometimes loutish indifference to truth -- should no longer
startle. It should, however, influence Mitt Romney's choice of a running
mate.
In his 2010 State of the Union address, Obama flagrantly
misrepresented the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which did not "open the floodgates" for foreign corporations "to spend
without limit in our elections" (the law prohibiting foreign money was
untouched by Citizens United) and did not reverse "a
century of law." Although Obama is not nearly as well educated as many
thought, and he thinks, he surely knows he was absurd when he said last
Monday, regarding Obamacare, that it would be "unprecedented" for the
Supreme Court to overturn a "passed law."
More important, and particularly pertinent to Romney's choice, was
Obama's Tuesday speech comprehensively misrepresenting Rep. Paul Ryan's
budget. (For Ryan's refutation of Obama, go to http://ow.ly/a6hPz.)
Remarkably, the 42-year-old congressman is today's agenda-setting
Republican. Admirably, Romney has embraced Ryan's approach to altering the
ruinous trajectory of the entitlement state and forestalling what that
trajectory presages, a "government-centered society" (Romney's phrase in
his fine Milwaukee speech Tuesday night).
Obama's defense of reactionary liberalism -- whatever is must ever be,
only increased -- is not weighed down by the ballast of scruples. His
defense will be his campaign because he cannot forever
distract the nation and mesmerize the media with such horrors as a
30-year-old law student being unable to make someone else pay for her
contraception. So Romney's running mate should have intellectual firepower,
born of immersion in policy complexities, sufficient to refute Obama's
meretricious claims and derelictions of duty. Here are two excellent
choices:
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Ryan already is at the center of the campaign, and is the world's
foremost expert on the Ryan-Romney plan. No one is more marinated in the
facts to which Obama is averse. Ryan has not yet honed his rhetorical
skills for communicating complexities to laypersons, but he is a quick
study. One drawback is that he is invaluable as chairman of the Budget
Committee and in 2015 might become chairman of Ways and Means.
Louisiana's Gov. Bobby Jindal, 40, was a 20-year-old congressional
staffer when he authored a substantial report on reforming Medicare
financing. At 24, he became head of Louisiana's Department of Health and
Hospitals, with 12,000 employees and 40 percent of the state budget. Back
in Washington at 26, he was executive director of the National Bipartisan
Commission on the Future of Medicare. In 1999, he became president of
Louisiana's largest state university system, which has 80,000 students. In
2001, he served as an assistant secretary of health and human services. He
became governor after three years in Congress.
Faux realists will belabor Romney with unhistorical cleverness, urging
him to choose a running mate who supposedly will sway this or that
demographic cohort or carry a particular state. But are, for example,
Hispanics nationwide such a homogeneous cohort that, say, those who came to
Colorado from Mexico will identify with a son of Cuban immigrants to
Florida (Sen. Marco Rubio)? Do these realists know that according to exit
polls, Nevada's Hispanic Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, won only about
a third of the Hispanic vote in 2010?
Furthermore, in the 16 elections since World War II, 10 presidential
candidates have failed to carry the home state of their vice presidential
running mates. Gov. Earl Warren could not carry California for Tom Dewey in
1948; Sen. Estes Kefauver could not carry Tennessee for Adlai Stevenson in
1956; former Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge could not carry Massachusetts for
Richard Nixon in 1960; Rep. Bill Miller could not carry New York for Barry
Goldwater in 1964; Gov. Spiro Agnew could not carry Maryland for Nixon in
1968; Sargent Shriver could not carry Maryland for George McGovern in 1972;
Rep. Geraldine Ferraro could not carry New York (or women, or even her
congressional district) for Walter Mondale in 1984; Sen. Lloyd Bentsen
could not carry Texas for Michael Dukakis in 1988; Jack Kemp could not
carry New York for Bob Dole in 1996; Sen. John Edwards could not carry
North Carolina for John Kerry in 2004.
For the next decade, American politics will turn on this truth:
Slowing the growth of the entitlement state is absolutely necessary and
intensely unpopular. In this situation, which is ripe for a demagogue such
as the Huey Long from Chicago's Hyde Park, Romney's choice of running mate
should promise something Washington now lacks -- adult supervision.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. George Will's latest book is "With a Happy Eye but: America and the World, 1997-2002" to purchase a copy, click here. Comment on this column by clicking here.
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Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||||||
