Congressman Paul Ryan is back in North Carolina this week. Today he’s scheduled to take part in a defense industry round-table discussion in Fayetteville. But yesterday in Raleigh – it was all about raising money and rallying the troops.
Leoneda Inge: The Republican Vice Presidential candidate used his campaign stop to bring attention to small businesses like SMT Incorporated. The Raleigh-based sheet metal fabrication company hosted Paul Ryan’s visit. A large blue banner flanked Ryan as he stood on stage. It read “We did Build it! The word did was underlined.
Paul Ryan: This is your business, your hard work, your sweat, your toil, your sacrifice, your risk-taking. You did this, this is your business, we’re proud of you, success is a good thing in America that’s what jobs are all about.
Ryan has used several of his campaign stops to take jabs at President Obama, framing him as hostile to small business for insinuating they need government to succeed. Ryan says Mr. Obama has made things worse not better since being elected.
Paul Ryan: And so, he didn’t change, he stayed hard to the left. He’s run out of ideas. And that’s why he has resorted to a campaign based on anger, based on division. Hope and change is now attack and blame.
Ryan praised Raleigh and the Triangle for its successes, but said the state’s 9-point-6-percent unemployment rate is unacceptable.
Paul Ryan: Joe Biden said the other day that the middle class is in the midst of a recovery. President Obama said that the private sector is doing just fine. This is the Obama imaginary recovery.
He says the Romney-Ryan Plan can get the U-S economy growing at four-percent and that would mean 12-million jobs nationwide and 355-thousand jobs for North Carolina.
Paul Ryan: Our rights come from nature and God, not from government! We come first before government as individual people.
Suzanne Loving: We’re very glad to finally have a candidate that believes in God and has integrity.
Suzanne Loving of Holly Springs attended the Paul Ryan rally with her parents and two small children. This was her first political rally and she liked what she heard. It was Gayle Hatch’s first rally as well. The Durham resident says she feels a sense of urgency about this year’s election.
Gayle Hatch: Because we can see the path that Obama is taking the country on, the kind of change he was talking about. And that is not the kind of change that I want for America. And it scares me. I feel like he is pushing us towards socialism.
Across the street and down a ways from the rally a group of about 20 protestors set up camp. Most of them women, at least one woman was pregnant, and another was dressed like a gigantic blue pack of birth control pills. Melissa Reed is with Planned Parenthood Action Fund. She said people at the rally should be aware of Romney and Ryan’s alleged War Against Women.
Melissa Reed: They want to ban the nation’s family planning program, they want to push ‘personhood’ which would grant rights from the moment of conception and would end up banning in vitro fertilization and the most effective forms of birth control. And I think that women voters need to be aware of how extreme this party has become.
Some of the women carried posters objecting to the controversial comments made by Missouri Congressman Todd Akin about rape and abortion. Ryan didn’t talk about those comments, but he received big cheers when he said Romney would do away with ‘Obama Care’ if elected president. That’s one thing the G-O-P wants to focus on as they head to Tampa next week for their national convention.
