Paul Ryan

Once again, the Obama campaign has done a great job of engaging voters through the two most popular social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, with Romney right on his tails. Ironically, the candidates’ official sites appear to be nearly identical to each other; loaded with pictures, facts, and links for visitors to click if they happen to be feeling generous, they seem more like personal blogs than campaign sites. This sort of behind-the-scenes, intimate approach works well for both candidates. President Obama’s Twitter account, for example, often feels like an extension of his own diary. 

The spirit of John Hancock and his gang of aristocrats——optimists all who risked their lives and property as signatories to revolution——is rare. Regrettably, that optimistic spirit——that spirit that drives all American progress——has been at historic odds with an uncharitable impulse among the American people: a selfishness that paradoxically afflicts both the afflicters and the afflicted, as we see in this election season.

Romney and Ryan, like Reagan before them, rip a page directly from the time-tested Southern Strategy playbook of Richard Nixon for GOP presidential candidates. The strategy has always had two prongs. One is to attack the liberals and bloated and tax-and-spend big government. The second is to firmly lock down the majority popular and electoral vote in the 11 old Confederate and Border states. 

In an apparent off-the-cuff remark, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan gushed that he thought it was a “cool thing” that an African-American was president. But Ryan’s rapture with President Obama didn’t last past the first sentence. In the next breath he quickly added that he didn’t like much else about Obama. The much else was how much Obama has spent on health, education and job development programs that would help the poor and minorities. That spending has been fiscal heresy for Ryan.