Budget Author, a Romney Ally, Turns Into a Campaign Focus

By MARK LANDLER
NYT

WASHINGTON — With Mitt Romney on a steady march to the Republican presidential nomination after a sweep of three primaries, both he and President Obama are seizing on the Republican House budget, and its ambitious young architect, Representative Paul D. Ryan, as a defining issue of the unfolding campaign.

After Mr. Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, helped Mr. Romney secure a crucial primary victory in Mr. Ryan’s home state, Wisconsin, the candidate on Wednesday tightened his embrace of the congressman despite a withering assault a day earlier from President Obama on the Ryan spending plan and what he said it reflected about Republican priorities.

In his most direct clash yet with the president, Mr. Romney defended Mr. Ryan before newspaper editors gathered in Washington as a politician who “unlike this president, has had the courage to offer serious solutions to the problems we face.” Other Republicans cast the 42-year-old Mr. Ryan as the intellectual light of the party and the heir to Jack Kemp, the late New York congressman who also specialized in fiscal policy and was Senator Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996.

The president sought to reinforce the narrative of two men joined at the hip. Mr. Obama noted in a speech on Tuesday to the same convention of journalists that Mr. Romney had endorsed Mr. Ryan’s budget-cutting fiscal plan as “marvelous,” and then went on to assail it as a “radical vision” that would deepen the inequality in American society.

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