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.
