Republicans Who Understand Democrats

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have an advantage in campaigning which Barack Obama and Joe Biden do not: Romney and Ryan have won elections in strongly Democrat areas and have learned how to make their case to voters who are not naturally inclined to vote Republican. Romney won election as governor of the only state that McGovern carried in 1972, a state which routinely shows near the top on the list of the most leftist and the most liberal in the union. Ryan won election from perhaps the most Democrat congressional district in Wisconsin.

Look a bit more closely in the families of these two candidates, and the inculcation of appealing to Democrat voters is even more profound. George Romney ousted popular Democratic Governor Swainson in 1962, gathering 51% of the vote. During the 1964 Johnson Landslide, Romney managed to win re-election with 55% of the vote, and in Romney's last election two years later, he collected 60%. This was in a state which was overwhelmingly Democrat and which had powerful labor unions which battled Romney again and again...and lost.

Paul Ryan's wife, Janna Ryan, has a long history of working in Democratic politics. She is the niece of David Boren, the popular Oklahoma governor who was elected to the Senate and then left the Senate as the third-most powerful member of the Democrat caucus. She also worked for Congressman Bill Brewster, whose Third Congressional District was nicknamed "Little Dixie" and which never voted Republican, even in presidential elections, until Reagan in 1980. This was also the district of House Speaker Carl Albert, the last moderate leader of House Democrats. Janna has not only experienced politics, but she has been immersed in Democrat politics.

These are strengths, not weaknesses, in the Republican ticket. Those conservatives who pine for the next Reagan forget that Ronald Reagan was a Democrat most of his life. Unlike much less successful Republican nominees -- Bush 41, Bush 43, McCain, Dole, and Ford -- Reagan had not been a lifelong Republican. He knew how ordinary Democrats thought, and he was able to win huge numbers of them -- first to his election, and then to his party.

The difference between the Republican ticket and the Democrat ticket is stark. If there is one salient fact about Barack Obama, it is that he has grown up in a plastic bubble of Democrat leftism. Hawaii, Ivy League schools, Chicago machine politics in a strongly Democrat Illinois...except for his election in 2008, Obama has never even had to try to win Republican voters.