By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
In a speech a year ago, an angry and exasperated President Obama hinted at one of the themes he planned to use to try to win a second term in the White House.
“The last thing we need is Congress spending more time arguing in D.C.,†Mr. Obama said just days after the House and Senate barely avoided what might have been a disastrous default on the nation's debt.
Mr. Obama's campaign long ago decided to run against the lawmakers who have blocked much of his agenda, and in particular against the Republicans who have controlled the House of Representatives since the 2010 elections.
The president's top aides said Monday that Mitt Romney‘s decision to pick Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate should make that task easier for them.
“There's a fully consummated merger between him and the Republicans in Congress,†David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said of Mr. Romney. â €œIt does draw Romney even closer to that caucus.â€
On the stump, Mr. Romney has spent most of the last year condemning Washington, describing himself as an outsider who would shake up the Capitol and bring a consultant's eye and private-sector experience to the operations of government.
Had he picked Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, or Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey - men with no real connection to Washington - Mr. Romney could have doubled-down on that outsider status and perhaps complicated the president's strategy.
Instead, Mr. Romney picked Mr. Ryan, a fixture in the leadership of the House Republican majority.
“He really prides the fact that he never spent a day in Washington and now he's picked a guy as his V.P. who has never spent a day out of it, in his adult life,†Mr. Axelrod said.
Strategists for Mr. Romney reject the criticism of Congress coming from Mr. Obama. The gridl ock in Washington is a symptom of the president's failed leadership, they say, not of the Republican lawmakers in the House.
Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, said Republicans will have a ready response to criticisms of House Republicans by the president: it's his own fault.
“He'll be pointing to his own failure of leadership,†Mr. Gillespie said on Monday, adding that Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. can't avoid the responsibility that comes with being in charge.
“It's not like he's been backpacking across Europe for the last four years,†Mr. Gillespie added.
But even as Mr. Romney rejects Democratic attempts to link him to the Congress, he is also embracing Mr. Ryan's Congressional experience as an advantage when it comes to passing legislation if he is elected.
“Mitt Romney brings private sector experience,†Mr. Gillespie said. That experience will be “helped by Congressman Ryan's leadership in the Co ngress. They are complementary attributes.â€
The challenge for Mr. Romney will be to reap the benefits of Mr. Ryan's can-do, legislative background while avoiding the Washington baggage that usually comes along with it.
That could be tricky when it comes to voters, who start with an ever-deepening skepticism of Congress. A New York Times/CBS News poll in 2011 put Congressional approval at just 9 percent - the lowest for the poll. (The approval number was 12 percent in a more recent New York Times / CBS News survey conducted in July.)
Among the likely causes of that dismal approval rating are Congressional actions in which Mr. Ryan - and Mr. Obama - played central roles.
- A government shutdown was narrowly averted at the last minute in April 2011 after Mr. Obama and the House Republican leadership reached a deal on the nation's budget. Mr. Ryan, as the chairman of the House Budget Committee, was intimately involved in the fight.
In his Wall Str eet Journal column at the time, Karl Rove, the former top adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote that the “Obama-Ryan budget battle foreshadows what Americans are likely to hear in the 2012 campaign: an unengaged, reactive chief executive versus a bold, reform-minded G.O.P.â€
- Four months later, the government almost ground to a halt again, this time over the question of whether to raise the nation's debt limit. The limit was raised - again at the eleventh hour - after a “grand bargain†to cut the nation's debt fell apart.
In a story in the Times on Monday, Mr. Ryan was reported to have opposed a “grand bargain†with Mr. Obama, saying it would ease the president's re-election. Republican officials denied that report.
- Out of the debate over the debt ceiling came legislation to force cuts in defense and Medicare unless Congress agreed on ways to reduce the debt. At the time, Mr. Ryan called it a “reasonable, responsible effort to cut gover nment spending, avoid a default, and help create a better environment for job creation.â€
But the legislation added to the cynicism among voters. And the president and lawmakers are nowhere near an agreement to cut the debt, leaving the specter of massive, across-the-board cuts looming over the election.
In addition to adding Mr. Ryan to the ticket, Mr. Romney has also beefed up his campaign staff, scooping up top staffers from Capitol Hill who have spent the last several years doing battle with Mr. Obama's White House.
Most recently, Michael Steel and Brendan Buck, the two senior spokesmen for Mr. Boehner, joined the Romney campaign to speak for the vice-presidential nominee.
That's not really a surprise. The halls of Congress often serve as a kind of farm team for presidential campaigns. And most of the staffers from the Hill were hired before anyone knew that Mr. Ryan was the pick.
But their presence provides a bit more ammunition for Mr. Ob ama's team as they try to link Mr. Romney and his campaign as closely as they can to the House Republicans.
That may be a stretch in the end, since it is Mr. Romney, a former governor who has never served in Washington, at the top of the Republican ticket. But Mr. Ryan's presence gives Mr. Obama's campaign an opportunity to exploit - and they are surely going to try.
Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.
