The Comeback Team

I’ve been saying for some time now that Romney will beat Obama by a landslide. His choice of Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as a running mate makes me even more confident that Romney will trounce Mr. Hope ’n Change. Ryan is an adult. Unlike Joe Biden, he does not regularly give the impression of having suffered a lobotomy. Ryan, unlike the entire Democratic establishment, understands that money does not come from the stork. He understands that individual liberty and limited government go together, and, what’s more, he is in favor of individual liberty, which the Democratic establishment certainly is not. He is energetic, articulate, personable, and mature.

Together, Romney and Ryan exude a spirit of competence. Obama and Biden exude a spirit of obliviousness undergirded by viciousness and, increasingly, panic. I know, I know: the polls do not support my judgment that Obama will lose and lose big. But the polls, Kemo Sabe, have been known to err. I feel about most polls the way Lady Bracknell felt about the Court Guides reporting the particulars of Cecily Cardew’s parentage: “I have known strange errors in that publication.”

Yes, a week is a long time in politics, as Harold Wilson once observed. But Barack Obama’s tenure as president has been such a conspicuous disaster that absent some enormous scandal in camp Romney, I believe he is a shoo-in. Of course, it is possible that we will learn something damaging about Romney. Maybe someone will discover that he sat for 20 years at the feet of a radical preacher who instructed his congregation to say not “God bless America” but “God damn America.” Maybe it will be discovered that he started his political career in the living room of a former Weather Underground terrorist who publicly declared that he and his fellow terrorists did not detonate enough bombs in the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe someone will turn up the fact that all his school records are sealed, that when he was a young politician he regularly voted “present” rather than take a stand on important issues. Perhaps someone will publicize the fact that in a radio interview he complained that the Civil Rights movement failed to provide for “redistributive change.” Maybe.

Absent something so disqualifying, though, I am sticking with my prediction. The man who has added more than $5 trillion to the federal debt, who is running an annual deficit of some $1.4 trillion, who has burdened American business with a nightmare of stifling regulations, who has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on failed “green” energy initiatives and non-stimulating “stimulus” packages, who has insinuated government into the private sector in blundering unproductive and fiscally ruinous ways and foisted on an unwilling public the horror of ObamaCare—that chap is going down and going down in a landslide.

Also read: Yes, Ryan Pick a Game Changer