Rep. Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s running mate will help the GOP carry his home state of Wisconsin and boost support among the young even though those on the left will launch vicious attacks against him for his policies to reform Medicare, political writer John Fund tells Newsmax.TV.
Fund, a columnist for National Review magazine, said the left will attack Ryan just as they did with Sarah Palin, pushing the idea that he wants to throw “granny off the cliff in a wheelchair” because he wants to reform Medicare.
“It wouldn’t affect any current seniors or people about to join Medicare,” Fund said of the Ryan Medicare plan. “So that will be attacked in ‘Medi-scare’ commercials and, you know, we’ve already seen Paul Ryan attacked as somebody who’s going to throw granny off a cliff in a wheelchair. I don’t think that’s going to work because people realize that Medicare is going bankrupt just like Medicaid and Social Security are.
Watch the exclusive video here.
“We have to update these reforms to the 21st century. And Paul Ryan brings real budget expertise, a real ability to connect with people and explain these things to average voters. And also, of course, he’ll help Romney carry Wisconsin, which is 10 electoral votes. And he also will help with young people. Ryan has a real can-do, optimistic attitude. He’s only 42 years old.”
Despite what are expected to be Democratic efforts to tie Ryan’s budget plans to Romney, Fund does not believe it will be an effective line of attack.
“Well I don’t think voters are going to go into the weeds on the Ryan budget and again, Mitt Romney is the presidential candidate,” he said. “He has said, ‘I applaud and endorse much of the Ryan budget but it’s not my budget that I’m proposing. As president I will have a Romney budget and it’s going to be informed and inspired by some of those things in the Ryan budget.’ What I think Mitt Romney is basically going to say is, ‘Look I’m the presidential candidate. Run against my budget, not against Ryan.’”
How good of a pick Ryan is won’t be definitively known until November, Fund said, “but we do know a lot of the Democrats are certainly worried about Paul Ryan’s debate with Joe Biden.”
“You know Joe Biden is four years older now; he’s perhaps not as quick on his feet, “Fund said. “But four years ago Sarah Palin fought him to a draw in their debate for the vice-presidential race. I think Paul Ryan is going to mop the floor with Joe Biden. And let’s face it, Joe Biden doesn’t have the command of facts and I think the facility with language that Paul Ryan does.”
Just in time for the election, Fund is out with a new book entitled, “Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk” co-written with Hans von Spakovsky. Fund notes that with 2012 likely to be a close election the Florida debacle of 2000 could be repeated and magnified.
“My new book is all about bureaucratic bungling because we have the sloppiest election systems of any industrialized democracy, and the voter fraud of that bureaucratic bungling and the sloppy laws we have can lead to,” he said. “So we need to be very concerned because Florida happened by surprise.
“Now, all the lawyers in the country, election lawyers, are going to be watching this election with tremendous scrutiny. And if ten thousand lawyers will be looking at it, that means lawsuits. We no longer need a candidate to win with a margin of victory; we need a candidate to win with a margin beyond litigation. A few thousand fewer votes for George Bush in Ohio in 2004, John Kerry and John Edwards would have taken that to court. So we could see five or six Floridas, if the election is close enough, and five or six states in which the result has been tested and we don’t know who the president is for hours, days or even weeks just like Florida in 2000.”
Fund said there are three areas of concern when it comes to voter fraud, voter impersonation, absentee balloting, and incompetent and even criminal voting officials
“We have 1.8 million dead people on the registration roll, that’s according to the Pew Center on the States,” Fund said. “Look, I don’t believe in representation without respiration but it’s very easy to vote in place of a dead person. There’s also absentee ballot fraud. That’s even more serious. You can vote absentee without every showing up at a polling place, without ever proving you exist. So, illegal aliens, felons, many people can vote absentee. We could crack down on that.
“And lastly, there’s an enormous number of problems in some jurisdictions with election officials themselves. We’ve seen recently the election official in charge of Troy, New York’s voting indicted; the election official in charge of Madison County, Florida’s election system indicted for voter fraud; An NAACP official in Mississippi going to jail for voting in the names of 15 dead people. So, we need to look at all of these. We need to crack down on bureaucratic incompetence and on outright fraud.”
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.