Romney 'Is For' the Ryan Plan; Why Wisconsin Is Important

A Romney campaign advisor says the former Governor supports the Paul Ryan budget; Ohio Governor John Kasich is scared unemployment in his state will rise; Krugman and Will make the case for Wisconsin.

On ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolous, Romney campaign advisor Eric Fehrnstrom said Mitt Romney supports the Paul Ryan budget. George Will asked Fehrnstrom where Romney stood on the Ryan budget, and Fehrnstrom responded: "Oh, he’s for – he’s for – he’s for the Ryan plan.  He believes it goes in the right direction. The governor has also put forward a plan to reduce spending by $500 billion by the year 2016. In fact, he’s put details on the table about how exactly he would achieve that. So to say he doesn’t have a plan to – a plan to restrain government spending is just not true."

The whole This Week roundtable on the economy can be seen here:

This could be bad news for the President in an important swing state. Ohio Governor John Kasich said on NBC's Meet the Press that he feared unemployment could rise over the coming months in Ohio. "The numbers that just came out, they frighten me," Kasich said. "I believe we're going to see in all probability some unemployment increases in Ohio. We're down to 7.4 percent, down from 9.1, which is great, but these jobs numbers are terrible."

Steve Ratner, former "car czar" for President Obama, defended the President's sagging job numbers on Fox News Sunday. "Nobody is happy with the rate of job creation today, but I believe without the policies the president put in place we wouldn't have even this level of job creation today," he said. "President Obama arrived to find 700,000 jobs a month being lost in this country," he said. "Since early 2010, when the job picture began to recover, we've added over 4 million jobs in this country -- we’ve added jobs every month since then."

Here's a surprise: one of Mitt Romney's campaign advisors thinks he has a shot to win. It's almost like that's his job. When asked how Romney's campaign was going on Fox News Sunday, Ed Gillespie said he thinks Romney will bring "change" in November. "There's clearly a feeling in Boston that Gov. Romney is going to beat President Obama," said Gillespie. "You can go back and forth about tactics and who won the week, but at the end of the day it’s the candidates."

George Will and Paul Krugman both agreed on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolous that the Wisconsin recall election is going to be extremely important come November. "It’s a microcosm of what the country faces," Will said. It's "an attempt to change the trajectory of the public sector," according to Will. "You have this extraordinary conflict there where unions are defending their privileged position," he said. "And it does look as though Wisconsin people are going to try and take that back. The man running against Scott Walker, Mayor Barrett of Milwaukee, has used the Walker reforms to save $19 million in the Milwaukee budget itself, so he’s running against a man whose reforms he’s emulating and using."

"And yet, of course, Walker is proposing tax cuts that will do much more to hurt the budget than any of these alleged savings," Krugman replied. "So this is – it is a microcosm.  It is – it’s not – it’s not fiscal responsibility versus irresponsibility.  It is a vision of what kind of country you want to have and whether we’re going to redistribute income upwards."

Tom Barrett appeared confident he'd come away with a victory in Tuesday's Wisconsin recall election during his appearance on CNN's State of the Union. He initially downplayed the lack of support he's received from the DNC. "It should be all about the people in the state of Wisconsin," Barrett said. "This is Wisconsin values versus outside influence, and again, I want to be on the side of Wisconsin values." Barrett said Scott Walker "wants to make this a national race because he wants to be on the national race, because he wants to be on the national stage as the rock star of the far right, as the poster boy of the tea party."Barrett then said he's "going to win it," and pointed to the turnout he's had with supporters in the weekend before the election. "We have literally thousands of people on the streets this weekend. So we are very, very positive."

David Axelrod was forced to defend the Obama campaign's ad strategy on CBS's Face the Nation. "Doesn’t he have to talk about what he’s accomplished and what he hopes to do before he talk about what the other guy’s trying to tear down?" asked host Bob Schieffer."Let me just correct one thing," Axelrod started. "We’ve run probably $25, $27 million of advertising this campaign and virtually all of it has been positive. A lot of attention was given to an ad, one particular ad… but if you live in the states where our advertising is running, you would see a steady stream of ads over the last month talking about the things that have happened over the last three and a half years, talking about all the hard work we’ve done together as a people to move out of the mess we were in when the president arrived. So I just have to challenge your premise."