Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Romney's Choice

One of the finest wordsmiths in contemporary journalism, Washington Post columnist George Will, penned a meditation last week on who Mitt Romney might select as his running mate and in the process offered logophiles and connoisseurs of fine writing, at least those frustrated by Mr. Obama's unsteady relationship with factual accuracy, quite a treat.

Here's his lede:
Barack Obama’s intellectual sociopathy — his often breezy and sometimes loutish indifference to truth — should no longer startle. It should, however, influence Mitt Romney’s choice of a running mate.

In his 2010 State of the Union address, Obama flagrantly misrepresented the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which did not “open the floodgates” for foreign corporations “to spend without limit in our elections” (the law prohibiting foreign money was untouched by Citizens United) and did not reverse “a century of law.”

Although Obama is not nearly as well educated as many thought, and he thinks, he surely knows he was absurd when he said last Monday, regarding Obamacare, that it would be “unprecedented” for the Supreme Court to overturn a “passed law.”

More important, and particularly pertinent to Romney’s choice, was Obama’s Tuesday speech comprehensively misrepresenting Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. (For Ryan’s refutation of Obama, go to http://ow.ly/a6hPz.) Remarkably, the 42-year-old congressman is today’s agenda-setting Republican. Admirably, Romney has embraced Ryan’s approach to altering the ruinous trajectory of the entitlement state and forestalling what that trajectory presages, a “government-centered society” (Romney’s phrase in his fine Milwaukee speech Tuesday night).

Obama’s defense of reactionary liberalism — whatever is must ever be, only increased — is not weighed down by the ballast of scruples. His defense will be his campaign because he cannot forever distract the nation and mesmerize the media with such horrors as a 30-year-old law student being unable to make someone else pay for her contraception.

So Romney’s running mate should have intellectual firepower, born of immersion in policy complexities, sufficient to refute Obama’s meretricious claims and derelictions of duty. Here are two excellent choices.
You'll have to read the column to see who Will endorses. Suffice it to say that either would make an excellent pick.