Conor Friedersdorf wants fiscal conservatives to recognize that Romney and Ryan won't possibly be able to balance the budget if elected.
As best as I can tell, a lot of deficit hawks are refraining from demanding a realistic path to a balanced budget because they assume Romney-Ryan will be better than Obama, and figure that more specificity is only going to hurt their ability to win the upcoming election. Isn't that tantamount to putting the same blind faith in the GOP that its partisans identified as a root cause of the Bush-era spending spree, and which they promised to never indulge again?
I realize that some on the right only pretend to care about the deficit to keep the coalition together. But the many earnest fiscal conservatives are in for a rude awakening if Romney and Ryan win. After a convention where the Tea Party went virtually unmentioned, foreign policy hawks got prominent speaking rolls, and talk of entitlements mostly revolved around restoring cuts to a Great Society program, the next GOP administration is shaping up to look a lot like the last one. And the conservative media infrastructure remains too much in the tank for the GOP to notice.