I'm back now from holidays and . . .

delighted by Gov. Mitt Romney's choice of  Congressman Paul Ryan as the candidate for Vice President.  Stanley Kurtz over at the Corner has this to say:

The combination of a slashing, class-warfare-based campaign by President Obama and now Mitt Romney’s selection of the boldly conservative Paul Ryan means that we face an epic presidential contest that will openly turn on fundamental philosophical differences between red and blue America. How did we get here, and what does it mean for our future? Above all, now that our internal battle is well-and-truly out in the electoral open, will 2012 decide whether red America or blue America wins for good?

First we need to understand that our political divisions are real and growing. They are rooted, not in top-down political rhetoric, but in profound and lasting social and cultural differences. For a while, analysts tended made light of our polarization, fruitlessly predicting year-after-year that our culture war (still raging) was just about to end. If anything, the culture wars have expanded now to include the whole of politics. It used to be that only arguments over gay marriage or abortion were stigmatized as moral abominations. Now even differences over health care reform and the deficit are super-charged with moral accusation.

Whichever way this election goes, these divisions will only deepen. Fundamentally, this is because what President Obama and the increasingly left-leaning coalition he leads actually want is impossibly far from what red America is willing to accept. Until very recently, this gulf has been hidden by Obama’s refusal to level with the American people about his goals. What the public still doesn’t understand, despite the president’s somewhat more open left-turn of late, is just how far left his second-term agenda aims to go. I’ve laid out some of it here, and Americans are simply not prepared for what is about to hit us should Obama win.

I am also glad that Ryan, who is Catholic, will have a chance now to publicly explain why conservative fiscal policies mesh with Catholic social teaching more so than statist and socialist policies.   George Weigel explains here:

Insisting that America needed a better approach to poverty than the Obama spend-a-thon (which, he argued, was accelerating a “debt crisis in which the poor would be hurt the first and the worst”), Ryan proposed that a new approach “should be based on the twin virtues ofsolidarity and subsidiarity — virtues that, when taken together, revitalize civil society instead of displacing it.”

May there be a real debate in this election.