Tryin' that is, to change the subject from the aimless, almost meta-campaign of Mr. Romney (whose campaign is about campaigning) to serious, deep-thought-provoking matters such as how to cure the deficit. You remember the deficit: it is a serious concern of Republicans everywhere whenever the Democrats hold the White House; at other times, "deficits don't matter," as the most recent Republican vice-president famously said.
Ryan knows the deficit, and the Debt. He is the "intellectual leader" of the Republicans in Congress, as established by his Roadmap budget. That's the one that everyone swooned over, when it was released last year, the one that would cut a skazillion dollars out of the federal expenditure, magically balance the budget, and restore prosperity.
Only it wasn't so. After all the confetti floated to the ground and was swept away, along with the dog poop in the gutter, the morning after, someone thought to take a look at Ryan's numbers.
And, in what follows, forget the broad implications, like the privatizing of Social Security and Medicare, and the elimination of Medicaid --how well would all those Bush "privately invested" Social Security accounts have fared in 2008, I wonder? Today, we're just talking about the numbers themselves.
Here's how he would do it: cut discretionary spending --total discretionary spending, not just waste, fraud, and abuse (which among Repubs are thought to be matters of actual budgeting by the Dems), from its current level of 12% of the federal budget to 3%, in the future. Now, given that the military budget is part of "discretionary spending," and the defense budget alone is over 4% of the federal expenditure, it became obvious that (1) it was impossible, without going back to Coolidge-era levels of government inactivity, and (2) no Republican would ever allow a 25% cut in the defense budget.
So Ryan's plan was, from the outset, simply dishonest, so much so that once this sleight-of-hand was noticed, and publicized, the details of the numbers were removed from his website, and even conservative commentators retracted much of their praise.
No worries: there are plenty of credulous people like Erskine Bowles, and journalists who cannot, and would never stoop actually to, read a budget or a balance sheet, who bought the meme: Ryan is courageous, serious, etc, etc. Once his status is proclaimed, never mind that it's based on a fraud, it's the story forever after.
Oh, and one more thing: Even Ryan's "bold, courageous" cartoon of a budget failed to achieve actually balancing the thing, for decades.
So now we get to hear the Romney-Ryan campaign talk endlessly about how they have a wonderful plan to fix the economy.
But they don't, and they know it.
