Returning from a week off on vacation, Glenn quickly dove into the biggest news of the past week: Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan to be his running mate as he prepares to ramp up his campaign for the White House!
“Mitt Romney has picked a solid, smart conservative for his vice-presidential running mate,” Glenn said.
“This guy was selected because of his budget credibility. This to me signals that Mitt Romney is serious about fixing the economy, serious about fixing the budget, serious about cutting the size of Federal Government. That is tremendous news, tremendous news.”
Glenn praised the choice over that of rumored contenders Condoleezza Rice and Tim Pawlenty, both of whom have less-than-stellar conservative credentials.
While many are heralding Paul Ryan for his budget plan and policy stances, he has also been praised for championing his faith in public. He is on the record as being firmly pro-life, and in his announcement speech he declared “our rights come from nature and God, not from government.”
Ryan and Romney have started to make media and campaign stops, granting their first interview to 60 Minutes’s Bob Schieffer. In the interview, Ryan showed he was able to keep the conversation firmly where it belongs, on the failure of the Obama presidency, rather than on any cheap diversions:
SCHIEFFER: You said yesterday -- I'm going to quote you, Mr. Ryan -- America is a place where if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead. But the fact is a lot of people don't think that's true anymore. They don't think the rules are fair. They think corporations and rich people are getting all these breaks and they're getting stuck with paying the bills. They see some of the wealthiest paying the lowest tax rates. How are you going to fix that?RYAN: What I see is a new amount of crony capitalism and corporate welfare which both parties have been engaged in but the President has brought this to a whole new level, where President Obama is picking winners and losers based on connections, paced on fads like Solyndra and basically giving handouts to businesses, giving preferences to the tax code. We want to get Washington out of the business of being winners and losers. We want entrepreneurs to have the barriers removed from in front of them so that people can work hard and succeed. We want to turn the American idea back up. We want a system of upward mobility and what we think we need to do is bring fairness back to the system by giving government bureaucracy and political clout out of the system. Those are the kinds of reforms we want.
SCHIEFFER: Doesn't fairness dictate that the wealthiest people should not be paying the lowest taxes, because that's what's happening many times.
GOVERNOR ROMNEY: Fairness dictates that the highest income people should by the greatest share of taxes and they do and the commitment that I've made is we will not have the top income earners in this country pay a smaller share of the tax burden. The highest income people will continue to pay the largest share of the tax burden and middle income taxpayers under my plan get a break. Their taxes come down.
“Not a bad start, not a bad start before the campaign has really even started,” Glenn said.