On his second day as a vice-presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan emerged Sunday as a tough-talking sidekick and flattering biographer for Mitt Romney,
playing roles that Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, has sometimes struggled to master.
Ryan, who has frequently clashed with President Barack Obama over the size and mission of the federal government as chairman of the House Budget Committee,
denounced the president's policies as failures and his governing style as corrosive.
"President Obama came into office with hope and change," Ryan said at a factory here. "His policies have been put in place. They are not working. They are
failing us. He didn't moderate one bit at all. So now he's turned hope and change into attack and blame, and we're not going to fall for it."
But Ryan focused just as much on his new boss, Romney, repeatedly telling his success stories at stops across North Carolina. He recalled the troubled Salt
Lake City Olympic Games, which Romney left Bain Capital to oversee in 1999.
"Remember the chaos, remember the waste, the bloated spending the corruption. Who did they turn to? Who did they ask to turn it around? This guy right here,"
he said, pointing to Romney, who stood ramrod straight, beaming toward Ryan.
Ryan's burst of campaigning came as Democrats seized on his selection to try to define him as an extremist politician who would destroy Medicare and deprive
women of
abortion rights.
"Congressman Ryan is a right-wing ideologue, and that is reflected in the positions that he's taken," said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the Obama
campaign.
"He is quite extreme -- good, good person, you know, genial person -- but his views are quite harsh," Axelrod said on the program "State of the Union" on
CNN.
Offering a critique that is expected to be central to the Obama team's argument, Axelrod said that Ryan's proposal to remake Medicare would allow private
insurers to peel away the healthiest seniors, leaving the federal program covering the oldest and the sickest, sending costs soaring.
On the campaign trail Sunday, Romney looked deeply relieved to have a No. 2 to split up the labors of a presidential campaign, projecting a new sense of an
energy and ease.
"I am so happy, I am so happy to have my teammate now, the two of us! It's now two on two you know," Romney said.
At one point, Romney joined the crowd at an event in Mooresville, N.C., in chanting "Paul, Paul, Paul," -- yelling his name six times into a microphone.
Romney, who is more of a hand-grasper than a high-fiver, seemed to adapt to Ryan's more casual style, slapping the hands of voters behind a metal barricade.
The crowds at Romney campaign stops have swelled significantly since he named Ryan as his running mate, breaking records for the candidate. There were 8,000
people at an outdoor rally in Manassas, Va., on Saturday, at which a number of attendees fainted because of long lines and humidity. On Sunday, Romney's
speech inside the NASCAR Technical Institute in Mooresville drew about 4,000 people, many standing outside in a parking lot. At the event later here in High
Point, the campaign rally drew 8,000 people. It was so warm inside that people broke off pieces of cardboard boxes to fan themselves. But it did not seem to
dampen their enthusiasm for the new ticket: standard speech lines aroused thunderous applause.
The two men traveled to North Carolina on the second day of a four-day bus tour that will also take them to Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin. Romney made clear
that North Carolina was crucial to his election strategy, telling an audience here Sunday if "we win North Carolina, we're going to win the White House."
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