Viewpoint: While exciting, Ryan could prove dangerous for Romney

Republican vice presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. greets supports during a campaign rally at Beaver Steel in Carnegie, Pa., Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2012.

It has been over a week since Paul Ryan was announced as Mitt Romney’s running mate, a move that has dominated the political airwaves on both sides.

With the dust now starting to clear and each campaign digging in for the long haul, it is worth asking whether Ryan was the right choice. While we won’t know for sure until Election Day, there have already been some interesting developments surrounding the choice that may prove to be pivotal.

For one of the first times since the action-packed Republican primaries, the election has gained widespread national interest. While many of us who are deeply entrenched in the race may feel as if it has always been center stage, for many Americans the decision is still far in the distant future.

The Ryan pick has sped up the tempo however, mobilizing both sides in a way that a more prudent choice may not have. Much like Sarah Palin four years ago, Ryan has forced many voters to pay attention to a race who might otherwise not have.

This has shifted the focus of the campaign to the Republicans, something they will need if they hope to supplant Obama come November.

While the limelight may be on the GOP, much of that focus has been negatively directed at Paul Ryan’s proposed budget, The Path to Prosperity. Up to this point in the election, the Romney camp seems to have attempted to remain vague in its specific prescriptions for fixing the economy -- leaning heavily on arguments that Obama’s policies are to blame for the economy’s sluggish recovery.

Now, instead of being a simple referendum on the Obama economy, the election has become a distinct choice between two well-defined plans.

Although the tough austerity of the Ryan plan is popular with fiscal conservatives—especially those associated with the Tea Party movement -- it may have the effect of alienating many groups most affected by the budget cuts, including seniors, students and lower income Americans. While the Romney camp must have known selecting Ryan would put his controversial budget in the forefront, they may have underestimated its adverse effect on the undecided independents most harmed by the cuts.

The plan has also come under intense criticism from economists.

Nobel prize winning economist and Princeton professor Paul Krugman criticized the budget as being “just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal” and “a giant game of bait-and-switch” that would dismantle “a key piece of the social safety net in favor of a privatized system”. While Bill Cheney, chief economist for Manulife Asset Management, described the plan as “not mostly about growth as much as it is about redistribution [of wealth] away from the poor”.

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research also harshly criticized the plan as being “a massive upward redistribution from the nation's workers to the rich” that “ignores obvious economic realities” as “almost everything in the plan has been tried and failed”.

Even conservative David Stockman -- who served as Regan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget -- called the proposal a “fairy-tale budget” that “has no serious plan to create jobs”.

While American politicians have a long and proud tradition of ignoring the pleas of economists, these academic criticisms may prove costly in this case, as much of Ryan’s role thus far has been defined as being an intellectual policy guru.

Were this view of Ryan as 'The man with the plan' to be discredited by the world of academia, the energy and excitement currently attached to the candidate may turn against him -- leaving Ryan more of a political liability than an asset for the Romney campaign.

J. Christopher Proctor is a Summer 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about him here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.