Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan addressed the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. on Friday and denounced Obama’s lack of “steady” and “consistent” leadership abroad “amid all these threats and dangers.” Across the world, anti-American Islamists attacked the U.S. Embassies and anti-American unrests spread to England, where protestors burned American and Israeli flags in front the U.S. Embassy.
“In the days ahead, and in the years ahead, American foreign policy needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose,” Ryan said. “Only by the confident exercise of American influence are evil and violence overcome. That is how we keep problems abroad from becoming crises.
“Look across that region today, and what do we see? The slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration.”
Before campaigning in Harrisonburg, Virginia on Friday, Ryan also criticized Obama for being prone to giving “lectures on all that we owe to government, as if anyone who opposes his reckless expansion of federal power is guilty of ingratitude and rank individualism.”
Ryan said while Obama “can talk a good game, the only problem is, the clock is running out and he has not put any points on the board” and “treats private enterprise as little more than a revenue source for government” and “views government as the redistributor and allocator of opportunity.”
Ryan noted the dismal results were in for Obama’s policies, and that is why Obama never uses the word “record” in any of his speeches and did not mention “unemployment” during his speech at the Democratic National Convention. Ryan also noted Obama never mentions his failed stimulus program.
“Here we are, after four years of economic stewardship under these self-proclaimed advocates of the poor, and what do they have to show for it?,” Ryan asked. “More people in poverty, and less upward mobility wherever you look. After four years of dividing people up with the bogus rhetoric of class warfare, just about every segment of society is worse off.”
Ryan said values voters are also economic voters, and said Obama has brushed off private institutions “with suspicion or even contempt.”
“This is what happened to the Catholic Church and Catholic Charities this past January, when the new mandates of Obamacare started coming,” Ryan said. “Never mind your own conscience, they were basically told, from now on you’re going to do things the government’s way.”
Ryan said it would be tougher to “find another group in America that does more to serve the health of women and their babies than the Catholic Church and Catholic Charities. And now, suddenly, we have Obamacare bureaucrats presuming to dictate how they will do it.”
Ryan also spoke about protecting the unborn, saying “we don’t write anyone off in America … especially those without a voice.”
Ryan will campaign at the Rockingham County Fairgrounds in Harrisonburg, Virginia on Friday afternoon. He will then hold events in Roanoke before campaigning in Florida over the weekend.
Romney-Ryan had a five-point lead in a Gravis Marketing poll released this week, but trailed by the same margin in an NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll, which oversampled independents. Democrats made up 31% of the poll, Republicans 26%, and independents 43%. The RealClearPolitics average of polls in Virginia has Obama leading by 0.4 percentage points.
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