I’ve been a huge Dinesh D’Souza fan since I read his Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became An Extraordinary President over a decade ago; it may have been the best Reagan bio ever.

And I got a chance to see 2016 over the weekend.  It didn’t disappoint:

The movie’s thesis is…

(Spoiler Alert: I’m going to talk spoilers below the jump, although to be fair I think much of what’s in the movie has been in the public domain; this is just the first high-profile place I’ve seen it all collected into one coherent thesis)

(more…)

Seen above a Romney/Ryan rally on Saturday:

It’s almost like Protest Warrior has come back to life.

…and ripped it out of the railbed, and beat Obama and the Dems over the head with it?

Legal language is a funny thing.  And by “funny”, we mean “funny weird”, not “funny haha”.

One of the left’s latest chanting points – abetted by Todd Akin’s groaner last week – is that a group of GOP legislators co-sponsored a bill, HR3, better known as the “No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion” bill.  The title more or less explains the bill.

In the original version of the bill’s language, the term “forcible rape” was used.

Of course, in the post-Akin political news cycle du jour, there is only one type of rape; it’s eminently PC to say “all rape is rape”.

And certainly non-consensual sex is, always, rape.  No argument about it.

Of course, not all “rape” is “forcible”, by definition.  If a 56 old guy has consensual sex with, say hypothetically, a 16 year old guy, it’s statutory rape – meaning “no force was used, but it’s still considered rape since the 16 year old is not of the age of consent”.

We’re splitting linguistic and legal hairs, of course.

Splitting hairs is something Third District DFL candidate Brian Barnes wasn’t doing when he accused his opponent, incumbent Republican representative Erik Paulsen, of drawing a distinction between “Rape” and “Forcible Rape”.   Here’s a statement from Barnes’ announcement for a press conference today:

According to Brian Barnes, “The voters of our district deserve the facts on Representative Paulsen’s positions on important issues, such as his vote to support H.R. 3.

Yep, they do.  And here they are; whatever the reason for the language, it is for Paulsen’s purposes irrelevant – because Paulsen was neither an author nor co-sponsor of the bill.

The word “forcible” was removed from the bill long before Paulsen got his first chance to vote on the bill – which he did, along with a strong bipartisan majority of the House.

This is a further example of how the Barnes’ campaign,. like most Democrat campaigns this year, are trying to rope in “low-information voters” – people driven by slogans and chanting points, who don’t really think that hard about the issues.

It’s not the most egregious example from the Barnes campaign, though.  More later today.

What does this chart represent?

No, it’s not the Brett Favre Media Bell Curve. It’s the comparison between:

• Obama’s projected unemployment with Porkulus (Dark blue line)
• Obama’s projected unemployment without Porkulus (Light blue line)
• The actual unemployment rate (Red dots)

Question for all you Democrats; if Romney releases his tax returns, will those red dots merge with the blue line?

(Via Instapundit)

Peggy Noonan on the media’s kid-gloves coddling of Slow Joe Biden:

If it had been a Republican vice presidential candidate who had made those gaffes, one after another, so comically, and all on tape, the subject today of the panel would be how stupid is this person, can this person possibly govern?

They know what matters, though. Romney’s income taxes and holding impromptu on-air conference committees to reconcile the Romney and Ryan budgets, three months before the election and five months before they take (God willing) office.

I’ve seen few better explanations of the Dems’ “Narratives For The Ill-Informed” strategy:

I used to joke “If a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an extremist?”

It’s not really much of a joke anymore.

It started almost as a joke.  Two years ago, as I watched the Alliance for a Better Minnesota run Governor Dayton’s campaign (let’s be honest) behind a set of memes that a modestly intelligent junior high kid could have shredded, I observed that the Dems seemed to be basing their campaign on winning over “Low-Information Voters” – at its most charitable, people whose entire political worldview is shaped by soundbites, chanting points and slogans.

But the idea that the Democrats realize that the (let’s be charitable here) not-very-well-informed are the present, if not the future, of the Democrat and DFL parties started to gel earlier this election cycle, as the Dems’ array of chanting-point-bots lined up, one after the other, behind the ideas that…:

• There’s a Republican “war on women”
• That Medicare is fine.  Juuuuust fine
• There there is no voter fraud problem
• The Tea Party is violent
• The Koch Brothers and Grover Nordquist are conservatism’s puppetmasters
• That the economy is really picking up speed.  (“Just look at that Dow Jones!” bellow leftybloggers who haven’t wiped the spit off their monitors from when they were writing about “The 1%” and “The Banksters!”.

Still, it seemed so simplistic.

I said “Seemed”.  Because the Obama campaign has just made it official.

Well, that didn’t take long.  It’s Eric Boehlert, from Media Matters – George Soros’ attack-PR shop – on Twitter. Emphasis added to keep me from puking:

@EricBoehlert #kindalame former Navy SEALs don’t have guts to admit they’re running a GOP, anti-Obama campaign; http://nyti.ms/N2nYYj

I think the “anti-Obama” bit is pretty obvious.  As is the alternative to Obama.

As to the guts?

After his little allusion to slavery, Biden’s next campaign speeches will, I predict, eventually include:

“If we’re going to beat the GOP hate machine, we’re going to have to step on the gas.  Before the Republicans turn on the gas.  Zyklon B” – speech to Jewish Federations of America convention.

“Beating the GOP hate machine is going to involve digging deep. Like when you’re trying to exhume an unidentified corpse from a crime scene” – remarks the Jacob Wetterling Foundation

“If Romney thinks he can balance the budget without raising taxes, he’s all wet.  Like you will be after he pushes you across the Rio Grande” – speech to Latino Democrat Association gathering.

Remember when they called Dan Quayle dumb?

No huge surprises in the primaries yesterday – at least not at the polls.

But the big news in my book?  The Strib’s poison-pen endorsements went 1 out of 3, with an asterisk on that “1”.

In the northeast subs, Karin Housley beat Eric Langness despite getting a snide, snotty, insincere little pseudo-endorsement from the Strib that served mostly as a free ad for the DFL candidate, wannabe professional politician Julie Bunn.   Hopefully Housley will go on to earn much tut-tutting from the Strib’s editorial board (or, let’s be honest, Lori Sturdevant, who seems to set the board’s political barometer).

But it was in the western subs that the Strib truly came a’cropper.

In HD33B, Tea Party activists (“community organizer”? Hmmm) Cindy Pugh pummeled career Representative Steve Smith by more than 2:1 – notwithstanding that the Strib gave Smith a glowing endorsement.  Glowing – but hardly surprising; while Smith had a few conservative issues (he was a solid Second Amendment supporter and had a Taxpayers League scorecard not too out of line with many GOP leaders), the DFL could count on him to vex the conservative caucus on some key issues.  That, of course, is why the Strib endorsed him.

That race was never really in doubt; Pugh had a huge lead from time the first returns came in.

The nail-biter came in Senate District 33.  Connie Doepke – the former Representative who decided to buck the SD33 Republicans’ endorsement of Dave Osmek – jumped out to an early lead, which became the only real cliff-hanger of the evening.  With every wave of precincts that came in, Osmek whittled away at Doepke’s lead, until close to 11PM, when with three precincts to go Osmek took the lead.  The final margin was 107 votes in favor of Osmek.

As Buckley once said, you should vote for the most conservative candidate who can win.  Both Pugh and Osmek are running in a district that is solidly Republican – something like plus 22, if I recall correctly.  I suspect they’ll both win comfortably.

Housley faces a tougher race; the northeast subs of Saint Paul are just about neutral, and the media will be out to try to re-install Bunn.  Housley will need some help.

To: Mitt Romney
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Budget Talk

Dear Governor Romney,

The next time the media asks you “what’s the difference between your budget and the Ryan budget”, you need to response “unlike the Obama budget, it exists”.

That is all.

They call him The Seeker

After 46 years in politics, will Wisconsin’s electorate ask of Tommy Thompson who are you?

To appropriate Israeli politician Abba Eban’s historic quote about the Palestinians, it can be said that former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The father of welfare reform and four-time gubernatorial winner in a state whose political environment was more blue than purple at the time, Thompson seemed like he was destined to advance on the national stage.  A presidential run in 1996 or 2000 would not have seemed a far-fetched idea.  Instead, Thompson made a quixotic bid in 2008.  Likewise, Thompson could have easily sought the U.S. Senate back home, with even conservatives hoping he’d run as recently as 2006 or 2010.  Instead, at 70 years of age, Thompson has bet on a political return after a 14 year electoral absence.

And for the moment, it’s a bet that Thompson is winning.  Despite an expensive and bruising primary against three other strong candidates, Thompson narrowly emerged the victor.  But after facing a self-funding primary opponent in Eric Hovde, Thompson enters the general election with a $3 million to $350,000 deficit against Democrat Tammy Baldwin.  Worse for Thompson, the double-digit polling lead he held as recently as May has turned into what Real Clear Politics averages out to basically a tie.  And this against the most liberal member of the House of Representatives according to National Journal‘s Vote Rankings.  Baldwin isn’t merely blue, she’s downright phthalo.

Some of the factors weighing down Thompson’s numbers are easy enough to spot.  Thompson has been attacked from the Right for more than a year – the Club for Growth was airing anti-Thompson ads as far back as August of 2011 and spent $1.7 million on the race.  The result may not have been a Thompson primary loss, but the ads definitely turned Thompson’s approval/disapproval numbers upside down, 43% to 39%.  And Baldwin hasn’t been simply waiting for the Republican primary to end to start her campaign as she’s already spent $4.6 million preparing the November battlefield.

But the largest factor holding back Thompson is himself.  A man who first came into office in 1966 is poorly set to capture the zeitgeist of an electorate that has tired of career politicians.  And while Wisconsin voters are less inclined to vote Democrat, as was the case in 1986 when Thompson was elected governor, they’ve also become less inclined to cross party lines in their voting habits.  Thompson’s blue-collar appeal that helped him win in union strongholds like La Crosse or Green Bay doesn’t mean as much when union households (or any other reliable Democrat constituency) will no longer even consider voting for someone with an ‘R’ next to their name.

None of this is to suggest Thompson can’t win.  In fact, he may already be slightly ahead as a Marquette poll has him up 5%.  That’s a far cry for a former governor whose lowest re-election percentage was 58% and still a distance away from a race that looked in the bag merely months ago.

It’s not the size of the gaffe that counts, it’s the motion of the back-pedaling

Joe Biden isn’t known for subtext – just text.

While the national media has treated Biden as something between a 21st Century Spiro Agnew and that crazy uncle who overstays his welcome during the holidays, Republicans have (dare I say?) celebrated Joe’s Bidenisms as occasional forays into the truth.  If Barack Obama represents the modern Democratic Party’s super ego, Biden represents it’s id – the innate instinctive impulses and primary processes.

All of which makes Joe’s latest bombast not terribly surprising:

Campaigning in southern Virginia on Tuesday, Vice President Biden told an audience that Mitt Romney’s approach to regulating the financial industry will “put y’all back in chains,” a remark that triggered a flurry of Republican criticism, including a sharp rebuke from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

“Look at their budget and what they’re proposing,” Biden said. “Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days, he is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They are going to put y’all back in chains.”

Biden made the comments at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville, where he kicked off a two-day campaign tour of southern and southwestern Virginia. He spoke before what appeared to be a racially varied audience of 900 people, and one prominent Republican suggested that his language could be interpreted as racially divisive.

The fallout fell on equally predictable lines.  The Romney camp tweeted that the comments were “outrageous” and reporters spent the afternoon filing bylines with stories repeating the VP’s gaffe.  If anything didn’t go according to script, it was the Democrat response – refusing to acknowledge any error in judgement and actually doubling down on the comment.  Biden’s attempt at “clarifying” his words still repeated the claim that Romney/Ryan would “shackle” the middle class.

Are Biden’s comments “outrageous”?  No, not by comparison to the media’s attempt to quasi-defend them by providing the sort of context that often seems to be missing from similar Republican errors.  Soledad O’Brien led off Anderson Cooper’s 360 by looping numerous Republican officials using the term “unshackle” (ergo, Biden was justified).  Politico decried the “death of the high-minded campaign” and despite having only one negative Romney example (in which he hit Biden for a 2007 comment about coal killing more Americans than terrorists), the website placed cover page photos of both contenders, suggesting that both camps have equally contributed to the debasing of the campaign.

Such defenders of context were no where to be found just days ago when Mitt Romney’s factual ad hitting Obama’s new welfare policies had politicos and pundits seeing racial politics.  Dan Milbank even unleashed a column that Romney’s ad “incites bigotry.”  Perhaps a conservative commentator will rush to pen a piece that explains how Biden’s comments were an attempt at “dog whistle” politics to African-American voters that not only will get published in a major newspaper but go by unchallenged by the Praetorian Guard of the Old Media.  But I wouldn’t suggest anyone hold their breath.

The issue shouldn’t be whether or not Joe Biden said something racial but that its become an acceptable part of the political discourse to accuse your opponents of putting voters in a form of bondage that doesn’t involve a safe word.  Such a mangled attempt to turn a phrase may pass for the talking heads at MSNBC or on whatever ham radio frequency that Air America continues broadcasting from, but without negative consequences, politicians will continue to feel free to double down on the harshest language possible.

It’s 8PM as I write this, and I’ll be covering the primary here and over on Twitter.

8:05:  Just waiting for results at the SOS website.  And waiting.

8:07:  And waiting.

8:12:  And waiting.

8:15:  And finally a result.  Sort of.  Lyle Koenen has two votes over Larry Rice in SD17.  That is two, as in 2 votes.  For the privilege of getting clobbered by Joe Gimse this fall.

8:23:  14 vote lead for Connie Doepke in SD33 with about 4% reporting.  Gonna be a long night.

8:30:  With about 10% of the votes in, Cindy Pugh beating Steve Smith 2:1 or more.

8:40:  No votes in from CD8 yet.  CD1 has 4% in, Alan Quist up by about ten.

9:07:  Big surge of votes for Osmek in SD33; he went from a five point deficit to well under a point.  Fingers crossed.   Pugh WAY up.

9:26:  Pugh’s been called the winner in HD33B.  She hammered Steve Smith by better than 2:1.  The west is red!  At the moment,with a little over 20% reporting, Osmek is behind by 35 votes.  He’s been picking up ground all evening (for the last hour and a half, anyway).

9:54: Cliff-hanger time.  Three precincts to go in SD33, Osmek behind by 12 votes.  He’s been gaining a few votes with every precinct all night; will he pull this out?  And will Doepke go for the recount if he does?  Looks like Quist is going to tip Parry.

10:36:  Still waiting on those last three precincts.  Going to bed.  This liveblog is over.  Good luck, Dave!

As John Edwards said, there are two Americas; an America that knows we need to unleash the economy and reform entitlements, and the part that plans to vote for Barack Obama.

But how to describe those two Americas?

• “Deadliest Catch America” vs. “Keeping Up With The Kardashians America?”
• “Producer America” vs. “Consumer America”?
• “Mom and Dad America” vs. “Santa Claus America”
• “Pack Mule America” vs. “Unicorn America”

I listened to a news item on the radio the other night.  In the middle of a couple of DFLers talking about their primary contest today, the radio reporter inserted a clip of Minnesota GOP chairman Pat Shortridge commenting on the state of the DFL.

“It doesn’t matter who they run”, Shortridge said, “It’s a contest between Extremer and Extreme-est”.

And I thought – “is this really news?  Taking time out from a story about a DFL primary for a GOP official to bag on the DFL?  That’s not news.  That’s not Man Bites Dog.  That’s not even Dog Bites Man.  Party chairs bagging on the opposition is Dog Sniffs Dog”.

Thats’ what I thought.

Or I would have – had it happened.

But there was no radio story about Pat Shortridge bagging on the DFL, dropped incongruously into the middle of a story about a couple of primary races.

That’d be weird, wouldn’t it?

Naturally, it doesn’t end there.  I said there was no story including an incongruous quote of Pat Shortridge bagging on the DFL in the middle of a story about a DFL primary.

But for some reason, Tim Pugmire, of Minnesota Public Radio News – whose putative motto is “No Rant, No Slant” – in the middle of a story about the GOP primaries in the west Metro, opted to drop in a quote from MInnesota DFL chair Ken Martin about the nature of the GOP races:

Democrats offer a much different theory.

“What you’re seeing on the Republican side right now is truly a civil war, where you have an already pretty far right Republican party being challenged by people even more to the right who feels those Republicans haven’t done a good enough job being conservative up at the Capitol,” said Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota DFL Party.

So why is the opinion of Ken Martin – who was imposed on the DFL by Alida Messinger to cut out the intellectual middleman – of any news value in the middle of a story about a GOP primary race?  Is he offering any opinion that would surprise one about a GOP primary?  Does his insight – “Republicans are teh extreem!” – surprse anyone?  Again – it’s not news.  It’s dog licks dog.

Now, had Martin had said “I believe this race in face defines the Minnesota mainstream”, that would have been news.  Along with the next week’s story, “Ken Martin found dead in ditch with Alida Messinger’s stiletto marks on his throat and electrical burns on his genitals.”

But as it is, what Pugmire gave us was a freebie DFL mention which was of no news value, but certainly made for a nifty little free ad.

Democrats who unctuously and tiresomely lectured us that “there are no Death Panels” (there are; it’s called Case Management) will smugly declare “Paul Ryan wants to kill Grandma” (whereas Ryan’s plan is intended someone can take care of Grandma – and Grandpa – after 2024).

Jim Geraghty goes into details, not that you really need them.

As I made clear on the show over the weekend, I was and remain overjoyed that Governor Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate.

It was a huge move, for reasons I expressed in my partly-tongue-in-cheek open letter to Governor Romney last week; it wasn’t the “safe” move, but it was the right move, for the future of this country.

Every talking head in the country spent the weekend solemnly intoning that “this choice changes the conversation”, which proves only that the the barriers for entry into the “Talking Head” business aren’t nearly high enough.  

Democrat talking heads giggle their smug giggles and chortle “this changes the conversation away from the economy – the last four years – and changes it to entitlement reform, the next four years!”.

Let’s forget for a moment that Obama and the Dems have not the faintest hint of a plan for reforming entitlements, much less recovering the economy.   Beyond that – do Democrats think the long-term economy is in any way extricable from reforming entitlements?  They think entitlements can ever be reformed without a vigorous and growing economy?

But the talking heads have a point; this election offers this country a choice.  This election is a battle between Silly America and Serious America.  Silly America believes that if you just demigog issues long and hard enough, and focus obsessively on contraceptives and tax returns, and ignore the real issues facing this society.

And there really are two outcomes.

If Serious America wins, and Romney and Ryan win, and they dig in and engage the economy and face the entitlement cliff, a lot of long, hard, non-sexy work will follow.  The nation will have a chance – provided the people stay serious, and keep serious governments in office – to avoid becoming a cold Greece with a more vapid celebrity class.

If Silly America wins, Obama carries on in office.  This nation runs up to the cliff smiling one of those smug, NPR-audience smiles as we sail off into oblivion.

And America will deserve to fly off that cliff, with all that that entails.

And then we’ll need a new conversation.  It’s hard one to describe; thinik of the one an oncologist has with someone with Stage IV cancer.

…a dumber person in American politics than Debbie Wasserman-Drescher?

It’s further evidence of Berg’s Seventh Law that the party of “Sarah Palin is teh dummy!” elevated “The Nanny” to their ostensibly top position (although it’s also evidence that the Democrat Party nationwide is no more relevant than they are in Minnesota; just as the DFL is nothing but a front for Alida Messinger, the national Dems are basically water-carriers for the Soros-led claque of liberal plutocrats, the government employee unions, and their useful idiots in Hollywood).

Tomorrow morning, three campaigns are going to get together to try to lit-drop Ramsey County.

They are:

• Sue Jeffers, solid conservative and talk show host at a station not nearly as good as mine, who is running for the Ramsey County Commission, and who needs to win
• Mark Fotsch, running for MN House in District 66A against John Lesch
• Tony Hernandez, GOP endorsed candidate for US House in CD4 against Betty McCollum

And they need volunteers to help.

So if you’d like a shot at shocking the world, ping the Hernandez Campaign.  Volunteer to lit-drop tomorrow morning (details are at the post I linked).  It’s great exercise, it’s just lit-dropping (not door-knocking), and you’ll be helping to shock the world!

Please sign on up!

(And if you can’t drop literature, feel free to drop a few bucks in the kitty!)

Flashback to high school:

(Harp arpeggios has hazy scene dissolves to homeroom at a high school):

GIRL: Who’s your boyfriend?

LEFTYBLOGGER:  Oh – he goes to another school!

(Harps return for more arpeggions as scene dissolves, then re-establishes at college)

PROFESSOR:  So what evidence did we have that Reagan was a crook that should have been in jail and who actively promoted the crack and AIDS epidemics?

FUTURE LEFTYBLOGGER: He was a Republican!

PROFESSOR:  Close enough!

(Harps again; scene dissolves, then re-establishes in a basement somewhere in suburbia)

LEFTYBLOGGER:  (Speaking as she types): Of course the the Burkett memos were real!  One of the world’s leading forensic document analysts is in my bowling league, and she says the case that they were forged has absolutely zero merit!  No, I won’t reveal her name, or the name or location of the bowling league, because I don’t want to put her in danger from all you teabagging wingnuts.  But if they gave a Nobel prize for document analysis, she’d have five.  And so if you disagree with me, you’re an idiot!”

(Harps again, as scene dissolves, then re-establishes in Washington DC):

“[The source of Harry Reid’s allegations against Mitt Romney] is an investor in Bain Capital, a Republican also, and somebody … who has been dealing with Romney’s company for a long, long time and he has direct knowledge on this,” [Reid aide Jose Parra] said.

Parra’s statement comes after Romney, in an interview with Fox News, challenged Reid to identify his source.

However, after some media attention on Parra’s radio interview, Parra issued a statement taking those remarks back.

“I do not know the party affiliation of the source, how long he invested with Bain, or his relationship to Romney beyond the fact that he was an investor with Bain Capital, as Senator Reid has previously stated,” he said.

The Democrat strategy seems to be to find enough of the stupid, the gullible, the dependant, the depraved and the incurious to eke out a victory.

Experience in Minnesota shows that at least 43% of any given population can be counted on.

Well, if only for this piece here.

With which I agree, yesterday’s commentary notwithstanding.

The other day, my friend and moderate alt-media gadfly Marty Owings left a note in the  comment section of my original post on Steve Smith to dispute my notion that Rep. Steve Smith is a “RINO”.  (Similarly, I got a few emails from Republcans – and yes, conservatives – saying that I was unfair to Connie Doepke – or at least about her political record.  I’ve found few defenders of her apparent potemkin endorsement from Erik Paulsen).

As a former boss of mine used to say, “From Salt Lake City, “Way out East” is Denver”.  People bring different perspectives to the table; it’s a fair point that Smith had a Taxpayers League rating similar to Kurt Zellers’ (and it’s ‘fair to point out that an awful lot of fiscal conservatives’ TPL ratings were lower than you’d think they’d be).

Still, I do go with Buckley’s commandment – vote for the most conservative candidate who can win (or do so if you live in SD33 or HD33B, which I do not).

Is there any question that Cindy Pugh is more conservative than Smith?  There was no doubt before – and there’s less doubt after reading the GOP’s release yesterday about Smith:

St. Paul – Earlier this week, the Republican Party of Minnesota asked what Steve Smith was hiding by not submitting his 15th day pre-primary report to the Campaign Finance Board. Republican Party of Minnesota Chairman Pat Shortridge issued the following statement regarding campaign contributions received by Steve Smith:

“There is serious concern about Steve Smith’s priorities and voting record in St. Paul. Instead of fighting for our conservative principles, Smith’s voting record has gained the backing of union bosses. That’s not surprising given that, according to a new non-partisan study, Smith voted in the interest of taxpayers barely half the time.

“While Smith has ignored the law and refused to file his Campaign Finance Report, which costs him $50 per day in late filing fees and could trigger future civil penalties, GOP voters can gain some understanding of who is funding his campaign by looking at his 24-hour notices.

“He has received $500 from SEIU, $500 from Laborers District Council of Minnesota and North Dakota, and $500 from Minneapolis Municipal Retirement Association, a clear sign that union bosses in St. Paul are trying to buy the Republican primary for their handpicked candidate.

“Smith failed to fight for conservative legislation in St. Paul and thus, failed to secure the Republican endorsement. Now, he is deceiving voters by not releasing his fundraising numbers and allowing the voting public a clear picture of his priorities. He should follow the law, file his report, and let voters evaluate who’s funding his campaign.”

If the GOP’s charges are true – and I do in fact solicit any response from Smith’s campaign or defenders if it’s not – then that answers that “is Pugh more conservative” bit.

And it’s clear if Pugh wins the primary, she’ll win the election.

Governor Romney,

I supported you in the caucuses – as the conservative alternative to John McCain, no less – and I’ll vote for you this November as many times as Mark Ritchie will allow me to.   If I go into the polls smelling like hemp and wearing Birkenstocks, it might be quite a few times.

But I digress.

My friend Hugh Hewitt the other day broke down your VP choices like this:

• If your internal polling shows you comfortably ahead, you’ll go Pawlenty.  He’s safe, he gives you a shot in Minnesota and the upper midwest, and he’s got the technical part of the job down.
• If it shows you ahead but close, go with Rob Portman.  He’ll help you clinch Ohio, and he’s a safe, competent choice.
• If they show you a little behind, you’ll go Ryan.  He’ll cinch up the base and give you some “zing” for the final stretch.
• If you look way behind, you’ll go for the long ball to Chris Christie.

Maybe it’s my Scandinavian roots.  Maybe it’s a lifetime as a Bears and Cubs fan.  But I say always play like you’re behind.  Pick Ryan.

Oh, I know – you’ve got the same people who gave us McCain telling you it’s just too risky.

It’s really not:

Too risky, goes the Beltway chorus. His selection would make Medicare and the House budget the issue, not the economy. The 42-year-old is too young, too wonky, too, you know, serious. Beneath it all you can hear the murmurs of the ultimate Washington insult—that Mr. Ryan is too dangerous because he thinks politics is about things that matter. That dude really believes in something, and we certainly can’t have that.

All of which highly recommend him for the job.

…

The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election. More than any other politician, the House Budget Chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline.

Against the advice of every Beltway bedwetter, he has put entitlement reform at the center of the public agenda—before it becomes a crisis that requires savage cuts.

While jobs and the economy are the killer issues this election (or should be; the media in its role as Obama’s Praetorian Guard is doing its best to avoid that happening), entitlement reform is going to the the issue that decides whether this nation remains viable or not.

And unlike most liberals’ and “moderates'” approach to the issue, Ryan’s all about fixing it the right way; through vigorous growth:

 And he has done so as part of a larger vision that stresses tax reform for faster growth, spending restraint to prevent a Greek-like budget fate, and a Jack Kemp-like belief in opportunity for all. He represents the GOP’s new generation of reformers that includes such Governors as Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and New Jersey’s Chris Christie.

As important, Mr. Ryan can make his case in a reasonable and unthreatening way. He doesn’t get mad, or at least he doesn’t show it. Like Reagan, he has a basic cheerfulness and Midwestern equanimity.

And the fact is that even if Romney doesn’t pick Ryan, the Dems are going to try to use Ryan as a negative anyway:

As for Medicare, the Democrats would make Mr. Ryan’s budget a target, but then they are already doing it anyway. Mr. Romney has already endorsed a modified version of Mr. Ryan’s premium-support Medicare reform, and who better to defend it than the author himself?

In for a penny, in for a dollar.

Republicans are likely to do worse if they merely play defense on Medicare and other entitlements. The way to win on the issue is go on offense and contrast Mr. Romney’s patient-centered reform with President Obama’s policy of government price controls and rationing medical care via a 15-member panel of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.

That, right there, is huge.  It’s a message that can resonate with both conservatives (who are sick of playing prevent defense) and moderates (who will, I suspect, respect a candidate who actually clarifies and personalizes the vague, too-big-to-process jeremiads they’re hearing about the issues facing this country.

And Romney needs to cement the base behind him.  Ryan would whip up the mass of Tea Party and western-conservatives that have been, to say the least, tepid on Romney so far.

If there’s anything that’d disturb the narrative on this election, it’s people getting “whipped up” by Romney.

Personalities aside, the larger strategic point is that Mr. Romney’s best chance for victory is to make this a big election over big issues. Mr. Obama and the Democrats want to make this a small election over small things—Mitt’s taxes, his wealth, Bain Capital. As the last two months have shown, Mr. Romney will lose that kind of election.

To win, Mr. Romney and the Republicans have to rise above those smaller issues and cast the choice as one about the overall direction and future of the country.

Americans have shown they will come together for the good of the country.  Pearl Harbor, 9/11, hatred of the Dallas Cowboys  – all have brought this fractured nation together.

Our very existence as an economy and a society?  That should count, too.

If we, as a party and a ticket, have the guts to make it an issue.

And if we don’t, then why bother trying to run for President, anyway?

So Gov. Romney – please pick Ryan.

Thanks.  And that is all.