By Rick Pearson, Chicago Tribune –
CHICAGO — Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan accused President Barack Obama on Sunday of running a campaign based on distractions to avoid confronting his economic record and of promoting “stagnation that fosters dependency” rather than opportunity.
“The economy is growing slower this year than it grew last year and last year it grew slower than the year before. So since the president cannot run on his record, he has to tear down (Republican presidential nominee) Mitt Romney,” Ryan said at a fundraiser in suburban Chicago.
“He has to divide this country. He has to distract this country. He has to distort Mitt Romney’s record and try to win by default. And you know why we’re not going to let him get away with it? Because you’re here today to give us the resources we need to make sure that he doesn’t get away with it,” Ryan said.
Ryan repeatedly contended that Obama’s campaign was focused on trying to divert voters from the president’s White House record through increasingly negative attacks on the Republican ticket.
“The president would love to make this big election about little things, about distractions. We know better than that,” Ryan said. “It’s time that we need real leaders to make real decisions and not to kick the can down the road, not to blame other people. And that’s our commitment. We are not going to defer these problems. We are going to run at these problems so we fix these problems before they get out of our control.”
Ryan said the choice in the Nov. 6 election was whether to elect the GOP ticket to put “these pro-growth solutions in place that have a dynamic growing economy that fosters opportunity, or we can have more stagnation that fosters dependency.”
“We knew they would throw the kitchen sink at us,” Ryan said. “We knew, with their 2-to-1 outspending on TV in a lot of these states, that they would try to muddle and confuse. But we knew coming into this final phase, the debate and choice phase, we would have the opportunity to offer our fellow countrymen and women a very clear choice.”
