Mitt Romney

It was just three weeks ago that I said in a post:

This has to be said as directly as possible...If you care about the federal deficit and national debt, Romney isn't your guy.

That's even more true now that Romney has selected House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) to be his vice president running mate.

Don't take my word for it.

Matt Miller is a straight down the middle analyst and columnist; a Democrat who left OMB during the Clinton administration because he didn't think it was serious enough about the budget.

So, as he did on Sunday, when Matt writes an online column in The Washington Post saying that, contrary to the GOP spin, Ryan isn't a real fiscal conservative, you have to take it seriously.

Here's the money quote from Matt's piece:

Is anyone else as perplexed about the timing and staging of the Ryan announcement as I am?

The Romney folks obviously had to do something to change the narrative from the past few weeks, to try to regain some momentum, etc. And it clearly needed an attack dog to go after Obama in a way that Romney, with his already high negatives, couldn't do. But...

1. A Friday night leak of the choice, the precise moment when it was likely to get the least amount of attention?
2. A Saturday morning event to show Ryan and Romney together for the first time, almost the precise moment when the fewest number of people would be watching?
3. A Saturday morning event that had to compete with the next to last day of the Olympics and when big, gold metal events were being telecast?
4. Two weeks before the convention? Doesn't this make the convention even more of a nonevent than it would have been if that was Ryan's first appearance with Romney?

I first openly expressed my doubts about the value of Mitt Romney selecting House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his vice presidential running mate 10 days ago. Here's the money quote from that post:

But Ryan and his budgets will be extremely vulnerable in a campaign because they include significant changes in Medicare. In case anyone has forgotten, Medicare is such a political hot potato that it has successfully been used in recent elections by Democrats to criticize Republicans and by Republicans to criticize Democrats. Polls show that even tea party supporters don’t want Medicare spending reduced.

Having Ryan on the ticket will allow the debate to be changed from what the GOP wants to talk about — the budget — to what Democrats will quickly say is the Romney/Ryan effort to kill Medicare. To say the least, that would put the Republican ticket on the defensive.