Emerging from a rough few weeks and down in the polls, conservative commentators are fretting that unless Mitt Romney gets specific and bold about his agenda, he’s going to lose on November 6.
But the Romney campaign has been outwardly defensive. Over the weekend, Paul Ryan rebuffed pundits in his own party, saying it is simply “the nature of conservative punditry” to complain.
“A, we still have a ways to go. We still have a lot left that we’re planning on doing,” Ryan said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published Sunday. “B, I think that’s just what conservatives do by nature. I think that’s just the nature of conservative punditry is to do that — to kind of complain — about any imperfection they might see.”
Ryan also took issue with criticism from both sides of the aisle that Romney has declined to outline the specifics of his policy proposals, most notably his tax reform plan. As push-back, Ryan offered his own reputation as a serious policy wonk.
“[H]is very selection of me as his running mate, the guy with all the specifics, who’s put out all these solutions on the table,” Ryan said, “shows you very clearly Mitt Romney’s not afraid of making big decisions, making tough decisions, putting specifics out there.”Â
Ryan continued to insist that his campaign offered specific alternatives to President Obama and said these specifics will ultimately be key to beating President Obama.
“And in any given week, they’ll be effective at distracting the country, but in the closing arguments of this, when people bring their minds to bear, do they want four more years of this same stuff? Especially when we’re offering specific alternatives on how to fix these problems, and [there is] just his utter failure of leadership. I think we’re going to be fine.”
Ryan’s interview comes as conservatives are beginning to worry that the course set by the Romney campaign is not enough to beat Obama. On the Sunday talk show circuit, conservatives like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Weekly Standard columnist Bill Kristol urged Romney to shift his focus from Obama’s record over the last four years to Romney’s own agenda for the next four.
But the Romney campaign has for months resisted these calls, insisting instead, as Ryan told the Journal Sentinel, that they are in fact “specific.”
“We’ve got specifics coming out our eyeballs,” Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus said on ABC Sunday, citing as examples Romney’s proposed 20 percent across-the-board tax rate cut and the Paul Ryan budget blueprint.
