By John W. Lillpop
By naming Paul Ryan as his VP choice, Republican Mitt Romney has, at least for the moment, rescued the 2012 presidential campaign from the banalities of “Romney-Hood” and “Obama-loney” silliness, which left both sides looking more like before-puberty boys arguing over a hotly-contested game of marbles, than adult men competing for the most powerful position on the planet.
It also put a much-deserved sock squarely in the mouth of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who has apparently forgotten that the Senate is supposed to be the “most deliberate body in the world,” rather than a forum for cheap partisan mud slinging based on nothing more substantial than Reid’s integrity, now just a distant memory at best.
The Ryan pick also brings to the fore the serious subjects of deficit reduction, entitlement reform, and spending cuts at a time when Obama supporters would much prefer to grovel in pig slop by tying Romney to the cancer death of a laid-off steelworker's wife in a political ad that makes Richard Nixon and his dirty tricks plumbers of 1972 look like Red-Cross volunteers by comparison.
Best of all, the Ryan pick pits the cool, intelligent, math geek from Wisconsin against Joe Biden, the gaffe-prone Vice President not generally known for acumen in matters involving budgets, or much of anything other than comic relief for a bitterly divided nation desperate for a laugh.
For making the Biden-Ryan debates possible, Romney deserves a couple of million votes just for softening the harshness of the dialogue and allowing Americans the luxury of laughing hysterically, all at the expense of the affable, but out-of-his league Biden.
