Yesterday Rush Limbaugh was talking about a column written by
Charles Krauthammer in which Charles was noting that
There are two ways to run against Barack Obama: stewardship or
ideology….
If you run against Mr. Obama’s performance in contrast to your
own competence, you stake your case on persona. Is that how you
want to compete against an opponent who is not just more likable
and immeasurably cooler, but spending millions to paint you as an
unfeeling, out-of-touch, job-killing, private-equity plutocrat?
The ideological case, on the other hand, is not just appealing
to a center-right country with twice as many conservatives as
liberals, it is also explanatory. It underpins the stewardship
argument. Mr. Obama’s ideology — and the program that followed —
explains the failure of these four years.
This is exactly correct.
In fact, while Rush was modest, in case you’ve missed it Rush
himself has spent year after year underlining the importance of
understanding ideology to understand the left – or for that matter
the right.
To pick Paul Ryan is to acknowledge that what Barack Obama has
done is a function of understanding why he has done it.
Four years ago Sean Hannity took all kinds of grief for
repeatedly focusing on Obama’s associations with Reverend Jeremiah
Wright, and the unrepentant bomber Bill Ayers. But there was a
reason Hannity kept coming back to this. To sit in the pews of
Jeremiah Wright for 20 years without a peep of disagreement about
the far-left Wright doctrines of socialism and black theology, to
begin a political campaign in the living room of the former
Weatherman Bill Ayers and his leftist radical wife Bernadine Dohrn,
all this was a sure sign that in some considerable measure Barack
Obama was in fact a man of the far left.
In 2008 America, tired of George Bush, uninspired by John
McCain, thrilled to finally break the color barrier in the
presidency, allowed itself to see something in Barack Obama that he
decidedly was not. This was not a man of some gauzy centrist
fantasy of Hope and Change. Beneath it all, totally un-vetted by
the liberal media, this was a hard core leftist who did indeed mean
exactly what he said. Barack Obama wanted to transform America.
Transform it from the historic America that is a land of freedom
based on natural rights given from the hand of God – to a socialist
“paradise” where your rights are decided by a Washington
bureaucrat. A land where the tyranny of government is involved
in every nook and cranny of life, running everything from your
health care to your business to your church.
Paul Ryan, a former aide to the late Jack Kemp, a man who
understands to his core the ideals of Ronald Reagan, is Barack
Obama’s opposite in all the ways that count. He is in many ways the
political son of Reagan and Kemp.
Governor Romney has scored a political ten strike. Within
minutes of the Ryan news the Obama campaign was already forced to
change it’s tune - moving away from slander to substance.
They’ll be back with more of the slander, for sure. But now they
will have to deal with substance - and somebody who knows that
substance better than they do.
Bring on the Ryan-Biden debate.
The future begins now.
