America’s Comeback Team: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan

Mitt Romney has selected Paul Ryan as his running mate. He is set to make the announcement in a little more than an hour. This pick will appease conservatives across the board. Not only is Ryan the author of the famed Ryan budget but he’s also a social conservative. There’s a must watch video of him taking down Obama and Obamacare in around six minutes. Ryan is no doubt one of the new intellectual political leaders of the conservative movement, he will be greatly cheered by the right. Generally speaking this is a good, safe pick even if it isn’t groundbreaking.

The Ryan pick is great for conservatives. Which of course means the media trolls will attack him. The New Yorker attacked his lack of private sector experience. That’s rich considering that Obama and Biden have zero private sector experience and Romney himself has spent his entire career, sans four years as Massachusetts Governor, in the private sector. These liberals in the media will always find something to attack a Republican over while conveniently ignoring the same problem in their preferred candidate. As the day wears on expect the attacks to become greater on Ryan from the liberal media.

Now for some conservative critique. I like Paul Ryan and think he’ll make an excellent VP. He’s like Sarah Palin in that he’ll excite the base and help Romney get his voters to the polls. But he is lacking, he isn’t the perfect selection. He brings no constituency to the ticket. Someone like Rubio would have brought a group of Hispanics with him, including Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Ryan has zero foreign policy experience yet as VP he will sit on the National Security Council. Any of the Senators mentioned as possible running mates would have had more foreign policy experience in the Senate than Ryan has had in the House. Ryan doesn’t balance Romney’s limited foreign policy experience.

The biggest problem all of us should have with this announcement is that it’s being made on a Saturday. What is the Romney campaign thinking making this announcement on a weekend, particularly an Olympic weekend? Friday night and Saturday morning is the time when campaigns and governments dump information they don’t want anyone to pay attention to. It gets lost in the sea of the weekend. No doubt Ryan will probably end up on most of the Sunday morning talk shows but those shows don’t matter to anyone other than diehard beltway insiders. Making the announcement today in order to get on meaningless shows tomorrow should strike everyone as curious.

Why not save this announcement until Monday in order to get maximum media exposure during a typical 24 hour weekday news cycle. As it stands, many people won’t even know about the pick until Monday. By then Obama and his team will have had time to pick apart Ryan’s career and life and thus the media coverage will be more focused on that then on the pick. It simply makes no sense to make the announcement today, at 9 am when half the country is still asleep. Why is the Romney team trying to hide Paul Ryan?

Make no mistake, this is a good pick for Mitt Romney. It will solidify his base behind him. No one in the GOP will spend significant time grousing about Ryan’s foreign policy deficit. We’ll all look forward to him wiping the floor with Biden at the VP debate. He is this year’s Sarah Palin, only more intelligent and more prepared for the national stage. For that we on the right should be excited.

UPDATE: Ryan is the guy arguing for free markets. His speech declares that he and Romney will lead, they’re definitely going with the comeback team theme. LD Jackson has a great collection of Ryan videos, everyone should take a look at them.