Saving Ryan's Privatizing

Ezra Klein makes the convincing argument that President Obama's Tuesday speech strongly suggests he plans on running against the Paul Ryan/House GOP budget in 2012, no matter who the actual Republican nominee is.

The message of President Obama’s budget speech today was this: In 2012, the Republican nominee for president is going to be Paul Ryan. And that’s true even if Mitt Romney wins the nomination.

That’s because Ryan is doing what Romney will not: Saying what, specifically, Republicans intend to do if they take power.

Mittens of course knows better.  President Obama is absolutely right to toss the House GOP budget chain around Romney's neck and pull as tight as he can.

Throughout the Republican primary, Romney’s great weakness has been his chameleon-like nature. Conservatives never really believed Romney was one of them. But that is, arguably, a strength for Romney in the general election: Independent voters might also believe that Romney’s conservatism is an election-year show, and he would govern as the reasonable moderate from Massachusetts.

Romney’s studied vagueness is an effort to make it easier for voters to take this leap: The less specific he is about what he would actually do, the more voters can project their own preferences onto him.

There's a lot of this going around the village, that Romney will be able to magically shift to the center.  He only gets away with that if the Village, the GOP, and President Obama let him do that.  The Village will do everything they can to see that happens.  The GOP will be torn in two over this, and that help the President.  And President Obama made it clear today he's going to be throwing the Ryan plan at Romney for the rest of the campaign.

By lashing Romney to Ryan’s budget, Obama intends to lash him to the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Where Romney has purposefully refrained from filling in the details on his agenda, the Obama campaign intends to use Ryan’s blueprint to fill them in on Romney’s behalf.

This can only work because Romney can’t actually walk away from Ryan’s budget: He’s already called it “an excellent piece of work” and campaigned alongside Ryan. Worse, Romney knows full well that conservatives would shriek if he began publicly distancing himself from the policy framework that the Republican Party has coalesced around.

So fight on, Mr. President.  Let's have the battle over the GOP Austerity plan once and for all.