It is refreshing to see the metamorphosis of the U.S. presidential campaign in the two weeks since the selection of Paul Ryan as Republican nominee for vice-president. It has miraculously evolved from one of the most unrelievedly vacuous election periods in American history to the beginning of an at least half-serious (i.e. among one party) consideration of the principal problems facing the country.

The earlier part of 2012 was filled with the snipers of the Democratic media — especially the giggly sharpshooters of the New York Times, Maureen Dowd and Gail Collins — aiming their derision at the ludicrous succession of Republican challengers that originally contested with Mitt Romney. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was exposed as a parrot for hypochondriacal vaccine-averse mothers on the primary trail. Texas governor Rick Perry, who jogged with a handgun and had his father-in-law (i.e. the grandfather of his children) perform a vasectomy on him, and had his infamous “Oops” moment at a televised debate, returned to the Lone Star state a laughing stock.

“Hermanator” Cain, a pizza executive, was flying high until his extra-marital paramours massed in such numbers that they could not all have been shoe-horned into the Republican convention hall in Tampa. Newt Gingrich, millionaire historian of Fanny Mae, reminded America of why he was known as “the Human Grenade,” jubilantly pulling his own pin with the words “Watch this!” Doughty Rick Santorum, in his sweater vests, extolled Christian values and sensibly advocated fewer lawyers and more genuine workers adding value to something. But he was also seen as something of an eccentric (he brought his and his wife’s dead fetus home with them in 1996 to introduce it to the other children), and was too easily portrayed as a medieval Inquisitionist secretly in favor of the rack for contraceptive-users.

As each rose to rival Willard Mitt Romney, they rushed over the wire and entered a conviction-free zone whose answer to the economic crisis was 59 platitudes interspersed with shrieks of “Freedom!” — and then fell away under the withering fire of the Democratic shooting gallery and Romney’s attack ads. All the while, the administration, which has been guilty of the worst fiscal mismanagement in American history and the most unsuccessful foreign policy since Jimmy Carter, if not Warren Harding, did nothing more than stand at a safe distance from the battlefield and take pot shots at Romney and his Republican allies. “Wedge issues” popped up like bunnies, and muddied the pre-convention waters while Mitt dispatched the non-Mitts, but ineffectually decried the volcanic hemorrhages of federal debt — a failing that Ryan was brought in to remedy.

Todd Akin’s remarks about “legitimate rape,” and the failure of the Missouri GOP candidate to drop out of that state’s Senate race, serve to obscure the truth that it was Obama who first provoked controversy in the bioethical arena. The Roman Catholic Church was ordered by the administration to pay for the contraceptive desires, including abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization treatments, of employees and students in Catholic institutions. When objections arose that this was a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and that it was both offensive and illegal to try to force the Church of 80 million Americans to pay for what it disapproved of (though in practice the widespread recourse to contraception by Catholics is not deemed a hindrance to their good standing in their Church or eligibility for its sacraments), the administration and its national media amen corner perceived a Republican “war on women.” Maureen Dowd instantly uncovered a plot by the Republicans to “force women back into chastity belts” (a device that not 50 women in American history had worn, and a plot that not one sane American remotely wished).

Until Ryan was picked, the country was evidently discouraged by this dismal contest. Never in U.S. history has a presidential race been so transformed by the selection of a vice-presidential candidate. John F. Kennedy’s selection of Lyndon Johnson in 1960 increased the likelihood of the Democrats holding Texas and some other southern states, but had no impact on the voters as a whole or the tenor of the campaign. Spiro Agnew had a similar effect for Richard Nixon in 1968. But Paul Ryan is the most interesting person in American public life in policy terms, and as chairman of the House budget committee has proposed a comprehensive plan for tackling America’s oceanic budget deficit, reform entitlements and devolve a great deal of government authority to individuals choosing their own health coverage (including the repeal of Obamacare).

Taxes would be reduced and greatly simplified under Ryan’s policies, and Medicare (which in the U.S. applies only to the elderly) would essentially become a voucher system. He knows the numbers and facts, and clearly has spooked the president, who can’t argue with him, but periodically flips out and accuses Ryan of telling the elderly and disadvantaged to drop dead.

Now the president will have to make the statist argument and plead his case before the country. The Republicans will have to fend off an avalanche of fear-mongering, but the country knows that their vastly wealthy nation has been chronically mismanaged by both parties and all levels and branches of government. The trivial, demeaning claptrap and back-biting that was all that has been politically on offer in that country since the piping days of Ronald Reagan will give way to debate on serious subjects, no matter how tinged with pyrotechnics about impending misery and bankruptcy (even if the incumbent vice-president, Joe Biden, an amiable malapropistic airhead, kicked off by telling an African-American audience last week that Romney and Ryan would put them “back in chains”).

What was shaping up as a real snoozer of an election between a failed president and a preternaturally unexciting challenger, may turn out to renovate the whole corrupt, hackneyed, clichéd, blowhard American political process, and generate the debate the times and the country require. If WMR (I know it hasn’t caught fire like FDR, JFK or LBJ, but I still can’t chin myself on calling a possible successor to Washington and Lincoln “Mitt”) can make such a tactically and substantively inspired choice of running mate, he may be able, as the oath requires, to “faithfully execute the office of president.”

From the Nationl Post

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