GO FOR THE MANDATE:

Paul Ryan's Friends )G. Tracy Mehan, III, 8.16.10, American Spectator)

You can live with enemies in politics, but you can't survive without friends. Ryan needs more than intellectual or moral support from conservative intellectuals, commentators, and even honest liberals, as important as they are. He and his "Roadmap" need the heartfelt support of his party, its leaders and its candidates across the country who must take the argument to the people in this watershed election year.

The stakes are too high for the Republicans to simply stand by, quietly, hoping the Democrats will self-immolate. The GOP needs to embrace a big, visionary idea, something like Ryan's "Roadmap," which addresses the most important political challenge of the age: the runaway costs of entitlements which were irresponsibly put on autopilot under both Democratic and Republican governments.

Ideas, good or bad, have consequences. If there is to be regime change in Washington, the new one better have prepared the ground with a clear articulation of its plans, no matter how politically daunting the prospect, thereby creating legitimacy for those plans through electoral victory. The nation can afford nothing less. Otherwise, it will amount to just "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss."

This is not to say that the GOP needs to accept every jot or tittle of the "Roadmap." But it very much needs to engage, substantively, the same issues as Paul Ryan has, heroically in my opinion, in terms of the long-run sustainability of America's fiscal and economic condition. The "Roadmap" should be the Republicans' point of departure for what must be a serious conversation with the American people.