Romney's bipartisan silver bullet: Paul Ryan?

Now we're going to tell them you're the Great Compromiser. Newly moderate Mitt is demonstrating his moderate bona fides by touting his up-until-now totally secret bipartisan weapon, Paul Ryan. No, seriously.

In the days and weeks after announcing their veep pick, the campaign sought to embrace Ryan's role as an intellectual leader on the right, while simultaneously shedding his association with the deeply unpopular institution of Congress.

That meant preaching the principles of his government-slashing budget plan without going into details about the fraught bureaucratic process he wen through to craft it. He was a nearly 20-year veteran of Capitol Hill trying to run as a sort of outsider. [...]

But in the home stretch of the race, the campaign's treatment of Ryan's record has conspicuously shifted. In Ohio, Romney wasn't introducing his running mate as a conservative crusader with big ideas, but rather as an earnest public servant who was eager to solve problems by working with the other side.

The campaign says it's been able to successfully alter reality because Democratic attacks on Ryan's Medicare plans haven't been effective. It's entirely possible that the voting population is like the Priorities USA focus group that didn't believe that the Ryan budget was an actual proposal, because it was so extreme they just flatly refused to believe a politician would actually do that. But it's also true that a traditional media, more concerned with process than policy, has focused on the horse race instead of the fact that Ryan would do things like decimate natural disaster funding.

Thus, the zombie-eyed granny starver, the guy whose refusal to work with Democrats and the White House to increase the debt ceiling resulted in the downgrading of the nation's credit rating, is now Romney grand compromiser. It's staggering, this campaign's ability to upend reality.

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