FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. - Campaigning a few miles from Fort Bragg, where patriotism runs deep and the local economy depends on military spending, Representative Paul D. Ryan pinned responsibility for a looming chop to the defense budget on President Obama.
Mr. Ryan blamed Mr. Obama for an 8 percent cut to defense in January that results from Congress's failure to compromise on a debt plan, even though Mr. Ryan voted for a 2011 deal requiring the automatic cuts as a way to force both parties to the negotiating table.
Mr. Ryan vowed that if he and Mitt Romney are elected, they will roll back the defense cuts of about $600 billion over 10 years.
“We will reverse these reckless, devastating defense cuts the president is bringing us toward,'' Mr. Ryan said. “We will recognize the primary responsibility of the federal government first and foremost is strong national defense.''
“It's not just policy, it's personal ,'' he added.
The impending automatic cuts, or sequestration, are the result of the failure of a bipartisan “super committee'' to compromise on spending and revenue, as required by the 2011 deal raising the nation's debt ceiling.
The deal included a Sword of Damocles provision that if no agreement were reached, $1.2 trillion in cuts would automatically kick in, half from the military and half from social programs. It is a deal Republicans now desperately want to unwind.
Mr. Ryan said here that despite agreeing to the deal-ceiling law, he had never approved its details.
“It was the president who insisted on this makeup, this formula,'' he said. “Defense spending is not half of all federal spending, but it's half of the cuts approximately in the sequester. We disagreed with that then, disagree with it now.''
A bill Mr. Ryan authored that passed the House in May would replenish military spending with deeper cuts to social safety-net programs for the poor, including food stamps, school-lunch subsidies and children's health insurance.
Senate Democrats and President Obama insisted that any deal include raising taxes on top earners.
“If Congressman Ryan were serious about avoiding the automatic defense cuts he decried in North Carolina today, he'd tell Mitt Romney and his fellow Republicans in Congress to work with the President to achieve balanced deficit reduction that includes asking millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share â€" as the plan President Obama has put forward does,'' said Danny Kanner, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, in a statement.
It is a deadlock both parties now are counting on the November election to resolve. In the meantime, there is no shortage of spin and image-management.
Mr. Ryan, who did not serve in the military, sought to burnish his defense credentials, mentioning that “one of my buddies just got out of Green Be ret school here.'' He showed a laminated card he carries with the names of soldiers from his Wisconsin district killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaking on a stage that included retired generals and a mother and a wife of soldiers who have died, he spoke of the economic impact of the sequester on North Carolina, a state Mr. Obama carried in 2008 by a whispery margin.
“Right here in North Carolina it will cost 55,000 jobs,'' Mr. Ryan said. “The president's demanding a massive tax increase on small businesses, which will cost us jobs, in exchange for these defense sequesters. We don't want to trade small business jobs for military jobs. We want more jobs across the board.''
The Obama campaign accused Mr. Ryan of rejecting a deal to reduce the deficit last year out of political considerations.
“Congressman Ryan voted for the agreement he criticized today, and he walked away from a balanced deficit reduction plan last summer because he thought it wo uld help the President's re-election prospects,'' Mr. Kanner said.
