he will talk about, i would imagine, the fact that some of these so-called, religious, cultural issues are not where his focus is. so he will likely give an answer on the issue that he supports, and then try to move back to some of the issues that are his expertise. it will be a challenge, but he ll try to help pull the ticket away from some of hose hot-button issues, because he can credibley argue that isn t where he s made his political career. that isn t where he s invested himself and not where he s scored political points. so he has credibility there to step away from some of those issues without some of the when we think of other candidates who are in the republican field where they would have jumped right in. paul ryan is not one of those. so these will be challenges of how he will have to stand in the kind of the white-hot spotlight, but there s a confidence and he s been a very
also talking about this campaign behind the scenes, they want as much of a distinction between the two candidates as possible. well, evidence dentally mitt romney wants that as well because he is now with his choice of a running mate expected to be paul ryan, would paint a bright red line that says, we are for this and the president is for something else completely different in terms of the role of government, what government aught to do in a down economy and how government aught to take on the very real problems of such a huge budget deficit in a fiscal imbalance. so that would send a very strong signal. and i think that s an important point right now about the kind of final stretch that we are going to see. bright lines, big distinctions between these two candidates. you know, the other thing, david, about you have spent a lot of time with paul ryan and you have spent, you have had a lot of people on your show that the ryan plan has been the center of the debate that you have bee
bipartisan events. you had people come out of there, i real like charlie, but that paul ryan, he s such a smart guy. that s his ability to connect and he does it on a personal level. so for someone like romney who s had trouble connecting personally with the voters, ryan is a very good selection. and obviously ryan needs to get his sales pitch on, because selling medicare and andrea mitchell, we talked about this before, the third state on this bus trip is florida. and it is my understanding that when governor romney was reaching out to various people to sort of get their opinions on the members of the short list, even governor romney would say, yes, would sort of acknowledge, i know this is going to create challenges in florida. it is going to create challenges in florida and other states. pennsylvania has a large elderly population and other states as well, where you have seniors, concerned about medicare, other people concerned about medicaid
security insolvency and he referred to clinton as a panda bear and that doesn t work. that was the end of songas s campaign. democratic primaries have shown how treacherous florida can be when anyone tries to speak very tough talk about medicare and the budget. go ahead, david. let s remember, too, the phrase change medicare as we know it. we ve been through the health care debate and how easy it was to define something that was complex in a really negative way. democrats have had a lot of experience doing this on the issue of medicare. they ll come out of the gate starting tomorrow, he s the guy that wants to change medicare as you know it, paul ryan, in a down economy for middle-class senior voters who depend on this, and these guys want to dismantle it. what they ll have to counteract is do we want to slide toward european socialism, we have to make tough decisions.
meet the press. and it s got one presidential candidate, frankly may have cost him a chance to get off the ground in the first place, mitt romney. when he and paul ryan debated the first time, you can t get more sort of polarizing than the ryan plan. fair or infair to call it that? if you remember, a big part of what the ryan budget included in terms of tackling medicare was introducing a voucher plan into medicare, preserving it for seniors currently on the program, but for younger americans that they would be down the line given a voucher and they would enter into the private system. and newt gingrich on the program said memorably it was right-wing social engineering and no better than left-wing social engineering. and he was accosted pretty quickly by average voters who thought that was a terrible response and of course at a conservatives rally. why? because very quickly paul ryan became the soul of fiscal