Romney and Ryan

A couple of good pieces on Romney and Ryan:

The Ryan Way by Robert Costa:

According to Romney insiders, Romney deeply appreciated Ryan’s willingness to privately share his critique of the campaign during the heated Republican primary, where Romney often struggled to make his case. As he watched from afar, long before he endorsed, Ryan drafted a series of detailed strategy and policy advisories, and discussed them with Romney over the phone. For Romney, those corporate-style memos made a lasting impression — and catapulted Ryan into Romney’s circle, where he has remained since.

“Both men are intelligent and very empirically minded, driven by facts,” says Peter Wehner, a friend of Ryan’s and a former Bush and Reagan administration official. “When he looks at Ryan, Romney probably sees somebody like himself, a person he’d want at his side in the business world or the political world. They approach complicated problems the same way.”

Since Romney’s veep search has been hush-hush, no one knows whether Ryan’s budding alliance with Romney will put him on the Republican ticket. But if Romney’s personnel practices — at Bain and on the campaign trail — are any indication, it would make sense that Ryan is a leading candidate for the job. 

Read the rest. And from Katrina Trinko, 'The Mitt Nobody Sees':

Mitt Romney may not be the worst human being ever, reports the New York Times: [. . .]  Romney has a long history of helping people out without fanfare, and it’s interesting how he hasn’t tried to exploit that history at all for the campaign. (The Romney campaign wouldn’t comment to the Times on this story, which seems par for the course: Romney just won’t highlight his personal good deeds.)

Read on to learn of his good deeds. Could it be that Romney possesses that rarest of qualities in a politician, humility? Milton Friedman on that essential virtue:

Those of us who believe in freedom must believe also in the freedom of individuals to make their own mistakes. If a man knowingly prefers to live for today, to use his resources for current enjoyment, deliberately choosing a penurious old age, by what right do we prevent him from doing so? We may argue with him, seek to persuade him that he is wrong, but are we entitled to use coercion to prevent him from doing what he chooses to do? Is there not always the possibility that he is right and we are wrong? Humility is the distinguishing characteristic of the believer in freedom, arrogance of the paternalist. [Capitalism and Freedom, p. 188.]

Amen. Coercion and arrogance are the hallmarks of the Obama presidency.

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