One week after being named Mitt Romney’s running-mate, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan makes his first campaign appearance in the Tampa Bay area Saturday night, appearing at a private fundraiser at the Treasure Island Yacht Club.
In advance of that event, two local Democrats running for Congress for the first time, Sarasota’s Keith Fitzgerald and St. Petersburg’s Jessica Ehrlich, bashed Ryan’s now infamous budget plan that calls for lower taxes and drastically scaled-back services on a conference call Friday morning.
Saying that it would break the moral contract to take care of seniors, disabled people, college students dependent on student loans and veterans, Fitzgerald declared that the choice was clear. “A vision of the the country in which everyone is on their own, and we do nothing to fulfill the commitments that we made to our elders, the disabled, to students to people who are unemployed to allow them to have a good future. That is what’s at stake here.”
Fitzgerald is running against Vern Buchanan in November in the Sarasota area, Ehrlich against Bill Young in Pinellas county. Both Buchanan and Young voted for the Ryan budget plan in 2011 and 2012, and the two Democrats are now hoping to boost their chances in November by pointing that out.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2012.
