August 15, 2012 11:03 PM UTC

Tying Paul Ryan Around Scott Tipton's Neck

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Durango Herald’s Joe Hanel reports:

National Democrats are hoping Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan’s selection as the vice presidential candidate will hurt his fellow House Republicans, including Rep. Scott Tipton of Cortez.

Tipton and almost every other House Republican voted for budgets that Ryan wrote. The plans would cut spending on education and social programs such as unemployment in order to pay for tax cuts and deficit reduction. Ryan also wants to convert Medicare into a voucher program for people who retire after 2023, at a possible cost of $1,200 a year or more for those people, according to the Congressional Budget Office…

“Congressman Tipton must now defend drastically cutting Medicare and raising health-care costs for seniors by $6,400 while giving a $265,000 tax break to millionaires,” [Jesse Ferguson of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] wrote in a news release.

The presence of Paul Ryan on the Republican ticket in 2012 carries some possible benefits, but mostly grave risks for Colorado’s most endangered freshman incumbent. One the one hand, the Romney-Ryan is campaign now attempting to defend, however mendaciously, the budget plan Ryan authored and Republicans like Scott Tipton voted for. That’s some relief for Tipton, who can point to Ryan’s defense of the GOP budget to defend himself.

The problem for Tipton is the defense of the Ryan plan as it’s currently being mounted is fundamentally dishonest, and as a result, not politically sustainable. If Democrats succeed in convincing Americans that Ryan’s plan would harm Medicare, thus making Ryan toxic–which they are now wholly invested in by necessity–Tipton could very well go down with him.

It may be even worse for Tipton for the debate to home in on Medicare, after he ran on a contradictory platform of “cutting the government in half” and “no cuts, no privatization” of Medicare in 2010–then proceeded to vote for a plan to privatize Medicare. Short of cognitive dissonance on a district-wide scale winning the day, there may not a face-saving way out.