Obama Dodges A Bullet

...with the announcement that Paul Ryan will not be his opponent in 2012.

From an editorial in today's WSJ -

Among the current crop of candidates, none has managed to articulate free-market principles and policies with Mr. Ryan's fluency or conviction.

A couple of days ago, before Ryan announced his intention not to run, Mona Charen wrote the following,

All of the Republican candidates talk about spending and debt, but Paul Ryan is the acknowledged master of the subject, not just in Congress but also in the entire Republican party. It is the Ryan budget that has come to define a party willing to make dramatic and politically risky cuts in the name of saving the country from bankruptcy. Ironically, it is the Ryan budget that would save Medicare — not the blinkered denial that passes for the Democrats’ plan. It is Ryan, with his mastery of detail combined with a sincerity rarely found among elected officials, who is best able to explain it.

He is, additionally, the most knowledgeable and articulate antagonist to Obamacare in the party — one who has reduced the president to sputtering incoherence in a direct confrontation. In February 2010, during the health-care debate, Ryan was among the Republican leaders who met with the president and Democratic leadership. In a six-minute presentation, Ryan eviscerated and embalmed Obamacare. The statistics rolled off his tongue with easy fluidity. He was direct and unflinching without being rude or needlessly aggressive. If that was a foreshadowing of what a presidential debate would look like, President Obama would be profoundly overmatched on this most critical issue.