A STORIED PRESIDENT

Jonah Goldberg

In 1995, Barack Obama released "Dreams From My Father," a compelling memoir full of stories about his life that -- though often not exactly true -- persuaded many people that this young man had a great political future ahead of him.

Nearly a decade later, Obama introduced himself to the country with a stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in which he conceded, "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story ... and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

"Even as we speak," Obama declared as he strode the high road at takeoff velocity, "there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes."

"Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America." He insisted that we stop listening to the "pundits" who divide the country into red and blue states.

"I've got news for them, too." Obama thundered. "We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states."

Obama's rhetoric soared high, despite the ballast of straw men clinging to his sentences like desperate souls clinging to the struts of an American helicopter leaving Saigon. (What federal agents, pray tell, poked around our libraries?)

Four years later, Obama ran for president as a "change" candidate championing the transformative power of words. In the Democratic primary, he announced that his true opponent was "cynicism" itself. Apparently, to oppose Obama's candidacy for any reason was to give in to dark motivations. Later, he explained that Democratic voters who preferred Hillary Clinton were "clinging" to their bigotries and small-mindedness. As ever, his candidacy did not bear close inspection, but it's hard to inspect something at such an altitude. Besides, as ever, he told a good story.

Indeed, as Obama told Newsweek reporter Richard Wolff, "You know, I actually believe my own bull----."

No doubt he believed it, in April 2008, when he assured voters, "We're not going to run around doing negative ads. We're going to keep it positive, we're going to talk about the issues." By July 2008, Obama was saying that the $4 trillion increase in national debt during the eight years of George W. Bush's presidency was "unpatriotic."

And by September 2008, his campaign was running ads ridiculing his opponent, Sen. John McCain, because he couldn't send an email. Never mind that McCain's inability had nothing to do with technological ineptitude and everything to with the war hero having been so brutally beaten by the Viet Cong that he physically couldn't use a keyboard. His wife would read his emails to him.

Of course, Obama won. People liked his story.

Some say President Obama has been a smashing success, achieving everything he promised to do. He himself told "60 Minutes" in December that his domestic and foreign-policy accomplishments exceeded those of any president "with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln."

Others claim President Obama was stymied at every turn by an obstructionist Congress that wanted him to fail. Interestingly, both stories can be heard coming out of the president's own mouth on any given day.

But last month he added a new twist to his tale. He told CBS News that "the mistake of my first term -- couple of years -- was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right." What Obama forgot to do was "to tell a story to the American people."

What a curious thing to say, particularly for such a storyteller. It amounts to: "I did everything right, but the public can't see it without a story.

By the way, if amassing $4 trillion in debt over eight years is "unpatriotic," how does racking up $5 trillion more in four years add up to "getting the policy right"?

And what was he focusing on? It's an uncontroversial observation inside the Beltway that Obama farmed out the stimulus and health care to congressional Democrats. What was he doing if not telling stories about green-energy magic and invisible recovery summers?

Just in the last few weeks, the Obama campaign or its surrogates have accused (either directly or by insinuation) his opponent -- I mean Mitt Romney, not "cynicism" -- of hastening a cancer death, being a tax cheat, and wanting to put black people in chains and give children E. coli.

But fear not. If you don't like those stories, the president has more. He's always got more stories. And he actually believes them, too.

Courtesy of Jonathan Garthwaite @ Townhall.com

THE PAUL RYAN CHOICE

Thomas Sowell

Governor Mitt Romney's choice of Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate is one of those decisions that seem obvious -- if not inevitable -- in retrospect, even though it was by no means obvious to most of us beforehand.

Anyone who wants to get a quick sense of who Paul Ryan is should watch a short video of a February 2010 meeting in which Congressman Ryan politely, but devastatingly, "schools" Barack Obama on the utter fraudulence of the statistics that the Obama administration was using to claim that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit. That video is available on the Drudge Report.

As a long-time member, and now chairman, of the Budget Committee in the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan is thoroughly familiar with both the facts and the fictions in the federal government's budget. In recent years, the fictions have grown much bigger than the facts. But, as Congressman Ryan reminded the president, hiding spending is not the same as reducing spending.

If this year's election is going to be decided on the basis of hard facts, the Obama administration is doomed. But the Obama campaign is well aware of that, which is why we are hearing so many distracting innuendoes and outright lies about such peripheral issues as what Mitt Romney is supposed to have done while running Bain Capital -- or even what is supposed to have happened at Bain Capital, years after Mitt Romney was long gone.

The Obama campaign's big smear, about how Romney is supposed to have caused a woman to die of cancer, has been exposed as a lie by CNN, hardly a Republican network. What smears like this show is that the Obama administration cannot run on its track record, so it has to run on distractions from the country's real problems.

When Senator Harry Reid claims that Mitt Romney hasn't paid his income taxes, and demands that Governor Romney disprove this unsubstantiated allegation, that raises an obvious question as to why the Internal Revenue Service has not prosecuted Romney, instead of leaving that to a partisan politician in an election year.

What makes this a farce is that Senator Reid himself has not released his own income tax records, while claiming that Romney's release of only two years of his income tax records is not enough, even though it has been enough for other candidates in other years.

If Mitt Romney releases all his tax records going back to his childhood, it will not put a stop to this fishing expedition, much less bring an apology when those records show nothing illegal. It will just provide more material for making more distracting claims to change the subject from the track record of the Obama administration.

When Ronald Reagan ran against President Jimmy Carter back in 1980, he asked the question that should be asked of the voters when any president is seeking reelection: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Four years later, when Reagan ran for reelection, he implicitly asked and answered that same question in a campaign commercial titled "Morning in America," which listed the ways the country was better off than it had been four years earlier. Don't look for any "Morning in America" ads from Obama. "Mourning in America" might be more appropriate.

This election is a test, not just of the opposing candidates but of the voting public. If what they want are the hard facts about where the country is, and where it is heading, they cannot vote for more of the same for the next four years.

But, if what they want is emotionally satisfying rhetoric and a promise to give them something for nothing, to be paid for by taxing somebody else, then Obama is their man. This is not to say that the public will in fact get something for nothing or that rich people will just pay higher taxes, when it is easy for them to escape taxation by investing overseas -- creating jobs overseas.

Even if most Americans do not have their own taxes raised, that means little, if they end up paying other people's taxes in the higher prices of goods and services that pass along the higher taxes imposed on businesses.

There are no doubt voters who will vote on the basis of believing that Obama "cares" more about them. But that is a faith which passeth all understanding. The political mirage of something for nothing, from leaders who "care," has ruined many a nation.

Courtesy of Jonathan Garthwaite @ Townhall.com

Romney-Ryan Ticket Puts Entitlement Crisis at Center of Campaign

Michael Barone

On the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk harbor, a coatless Mitt Romney named a tieless Paul Ryan as his vice presidential nominee.

Romney's choice was not much of a surprise after he told NBC's Chuck Todd on Thursday that he wanted someone with a "vision for the country, that adds something to the political discourse about the direction of the country. I mean, I happen to believe this is a defining election for America, that we're going to be voting for what kind of America we're going to have."

This arguably describes some of the others mentioned as possible nominees, but it clearly fits Ryan.

He doesn't fit some of the standard criteria for vice president. He hasn't won a statewide election, held an executive position or become well-known nationally or even in much of Wisconsin.

But more than anyone else, more even (as impolite as it is to say) than the putative presidential nominee, Ryan has set the course for the Republican Party for the past three years, both on policy and in politics. From his post as chairman of the House Budget Committee, he has made himself not just a plausible national nominee but a formidable one by advancing and arguing for major changes in entitlement policy.

He has argued consistently that entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -- are on an unsustainable trajectory. Left alone, they threaten to crowd out necessary government spending and throttle the private sector.

Few public policy experts, on the center-left as well as the right, disagree. But many politicians, certainly those in the Obama White House, shy away from confronting the entitlement crisis. Better to demagogue your way through one more election cycle and kick the can down the road.

What's astonishing is that Ryan has persuaded his fellow Republicans to follow his lead. Almost all House and Senate Republicans have voted for his budget resolutions. And they have included his proposal to change Medicare, for those currently younger than 55, from the current fee-for-service system to premium support, in which recipients would choose from an array of insurers, with subsidies to low earners.

Republicans rallied to the Ryan plan during the nomination contest. Newt Gingrich was lambasted for calling Ryan's budget right-wing social engineering, while Romney over time moved to embrace the basic elements of Ryan's budget and Medicare reforms.

Ryan campaigned enthusiastically for Romney in the Wisconsin primary, and there was clearly a rapport between these two number crunchers. Romney would defer to Ryan to answer and has made a point of staying in touch with him after clinching the nomination.

As a number cruncher, Romney surely recognizes that Ryan knows federal budget policy about as well as anyone. And the sometimes politically tone-deaf Romney must admire Ryan's ability, honed in hundreds of town meetings in his marginal congressional district, to explain his stances in a way that wins over ordinary voters.

Naturally, Democrats have attacked the Ryan plan as gutting Medicare and have produced an ad showing Ryan shoving a wheelchair-bound granny down a hill. They're licking their chops at the prospect of running a Mediscare campaign against the Romney-Ryan ticket.

But it's not clear that the Mediscare tactic will work when the issue gains great visibility, as it will from Ryan's selection.

For Ryan and Romney can make the point -- lost in the shuffle when this is a low-visibility issue -- that their plan would leave the current Medicare system in place for current recipients and those who are 55 or older. Those who have made plans based on the present program could continue to rely on it.

But they also can make the point that their reforms are necessary in order to make sure Medicare is sustainable in the long run. Polls show that many voters younger than 55 doubt that they ever will get the Medicare and Social Security benefits they've been promised.

One more thing about Ryan, I think, appealed to Romney. He already has shown he cannot be intimidated by the most eminent opponent. Watch the video of Ryan's five-minute evisceration of Obamacare at the president's Blair House meeting. You can tell that Obama didn't like it one bit.

He'd better get used to it. Obama's side is relying on trash-talking ads. Romney's selection of Ryan shows he wants a debate on whether America should follow Obama on the road to a European-style welfare state.

Courtesy of Jonathan Garthwaite @ Townhall.com