Rock music pounded out of the speakers and the waiting crowd was
at one point treated to back-to-back songs by Kiss, first “Detroit
Rock City” and then “Shout It Out Loud.” However, the crowd
gathered on a hot Saturday afternoon inside the Harris Pavilion in
Manassas, Virginia, wasn’t there for a concert. They were awaiting
the arrival of the new-minted Republican presidential ticket, and
the excitement generated by Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as
his running mate was hard to miss as thousands crowded into
downtown Manassas for the event.
How big was the crowd? Huge. Enormous. Gigantic. It was
difficult to get an estimate because the audience attending the
rally overflowed the pavilion (which has an official capacity of
1,000) and filled the surrounding plaza. Lines to get into the
venue circled around several blocks and, when Romney and Ryan
arrived, there were still hundreds waiting to get through the metal
detectors. Susan Ferrechio of the Washington Examiner, who
rode into town on the press bus, shot a photo of the crowd lining
the streets of Manassas that prompted the paper’s editorial page
editor Mark Tapscott to
muse that the polls must be wrong: “How to explain such crowds
if Obama is leading in Virginia, one of the key swing states?”
Indeed, it is hard to reconcile Saturday’s enthusiastic
Republican turnout for the Romney-Ryan tour of Virginia with polls
showing President Obama ahead in the Old Dominion by
3.2 points in the Real Clear Politics average. The prosperous
Northern Virginia suburbs of D.C. are the crucial “swing” section
of the Commonwealth, and a strong GOP wave in the 2009-2010
elections — electing Bob McDonnell governor and defeating three
incumbent congressional Democrats — would seem to indicate
Virginia has returned to the Republican column. (See my July 16
report, “Battleground
Virginia.”) Yet the Romney campaign can’t afford to take the
state for granted, which probably explains why Romney announced his
running mate pick in Norfolk at the beginning of a daylong bus trip
across Virginia. When Romney and Ryan took the stage in Manassas
for the last stop of the trip, CNN
reporter Jim Acosta found himself shouting to be heard above
the cheering thousands: “This is as loud as I have heard a Romney
campaign rally,” Acosta told CNN anchor Deborah Feyerich. “This
crowd is fired up.”
Clearly the crowd was excited by the choice of Ryan, the
Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee, whose
detailed plan to balance the federal budget has made him something
of a GOP rock star. Ryan is remarkably young. Now 42, Ryan was only
a first- grader in 1976 when Kiss released the heavy-metal anthems
played as warm-up music at the Manassas rally. His youth is viewed
as a point in his favor by conservatives with bad memories of the
2008 mismatch between the vigorous young Obama and geriatric John
McCain, who lost the
under-30 vote by a 2-to-1 margin. “Paul Ryan is fresh, young,
energetic, smart, courageous, and ready for prime time,” syndicated
columnist
Michelle Malkin exclaimed in endorsing Romney’s choice. Yet as
Romney made sure to remind the Republican crowd in Manassas, Ryan’s
youth doesn’t mean he’s inexperienced. “This is a man who learned
leadership young because leadership is a function of character and
courage,” Romney said of Ryan, a seven-term congressman. “As a
young man, a high schooler, his dad died and he was forced to grow
up quickly.”
Ryan came to Washington fresh out of college in 1992 and worked
as a GOP congressional aide before returning to his native
Wisconsin to win his own House seat in 1998. His acknowledged
mastery of fiscal and economic policy earned him praise from the
Weekly Standard as “the Republican Party’s intellectual
leader.” That article
by Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes, urging Romney to make a
“bold” choice in his VP pick, was part of a 10-day flurry of
last-minute speculation that was ultimately revealed as
unnecessary. Conservatives feared that Romney would go with a
“safe” choice like Ohio Sen. Rob Portman or former Minnesota Gov.
Tim Pawlenty although, according to campaign staffers, Romney
actually decided Aug. 1 that Ryan would be his running mate.
The boldness of Romney’s choice surprised some, including the
mysterious blogger Allahpundit at the popular conservative Hot Air
site, who invoked
a science fiction analogy: “It’s like watching C-3PO lead the
raid on the Death Star.” (This comparison of Romney to C-3PO, the
comically effete robot of the Star Wars film series, might
dismay Democrats who have spent the past several weeks trying to
convince voters that Romney is actually Darth Vader.) In choosing
Ryan, Romney was seen as making a bid for Tea Party support while
also signaling his intent to focus the fall campaign on the
economic and fiscal issues that are Ryan’s speciality. Democrats
and liberal pundits immediately began chattering about what a
disastrous choice Romney had made. Obama adviser
David Axelrod called Ryan’s views “extreme” and MSNBC’s
Andrea Mitchell declared that Ryan is “not a pick for suburban
moms, not a pick for women.” Mitchell’s opinion was certainly not
shared by the many suburban moms who turned out Saturday for the
Romney-Ryan rally in Manassas. Female enthusiasm for the tall,
dark, blue-eyed Irishman caused me to remark that Ryan’s Secret
Service code name should be “Dreamy.”
Whether their enthusiasm was inspired by Ryan’s bold policies or
his blue eyes, conservatives were encouraged by Romney’s choice.
Ryan immediately showed himself willing to take the fight to Obama,
telling the Manassas crowd that the president aspires to “a
government-centered society with a government-run economy.” Obama’s
policies are “not working,” Ryan said, and the president “is not
going to be able to run for re-election on his record because it’s
a terrible record.… He’s going to divide the country, to distract
the country, to try and win this election by default.”
Ryan’s confrontational rhetoric reassured conservatives who have
complained bitterly about what they see as John McCain’s failure to
“get tough” with Obama during the 2008 campaign. Conservatives
circulated online videos of Ryan’s previous confrontations with
Obama, including one in which the Republican congressman denounced the president’s health-care
plan as “full of gimmicks and smoke and mirrors.” Hillsdale
College history Professor Paul
Rahe hailed Romney’s choice of Ryan as a “declaration of war”
on Obama. “There will be no evasion, no triangulation, no attempt
to mask what is at stake in this election,” Rahe wrote. “Instead,
Romney and Ryan will directly confront Barack Obama and call him to
account for putting us on a ruinous course.”
Paul Ryan is clearly the kind of Republican who, as Ronald
Reagan said, prefers bold colors to pale pastels. Ryan will not
whisper the conservative message — he’ll shout it out loud. And
judging from the reaction he’s gotten so far, Republicans are ready
to rock.
