Romney and Ryan had planned to split up on the trail. The Romney-Ryan united front

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan plan to campaign together again sooner than aides had originally planned, likely twice next week, as part of a new offensive to take on the touchy issue of Medicare, campaign officials tell POLITICO.

Despite the continued skepticism among GOP operatives in Washington and on House and Senate races, Romney officials insist that the addition of Ryan has produced a more confident campaign with a clearer message, focused on big ideas rather than the pettiness that had earlier threatened to submerge the race.


Romney and Ryan had planned to go their separate ways before meeting up at the end of the month at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. But then campaign strategists saw how much of a psychic boost Romney got from Ryan — and how much more animated Romney appeared on television with his younger running mate at his side.

“They really like each other and they feed off of each other,” campaign manager Matt Rhoades said. “There’s an energy, there’s a chemistry.”

( PHOTOS: Romney and Ryan, BFFs)

Advisers say Ryan helps ease the former governor’s feeling of isolation. And the campaign wants to replicate the size and enthusiasm of last weekend’s crowds, which were the largest of the campaign so far. So the two will hold a town hall Monday morning at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., and are likely to appear together in the Midwest later in the week. In the meantime, Ryan will work swing states while Romney raises money.

Ryan pointed out Sunday in his interview with “60 Minutes”: “My mom is a Medicare senior in Florida.” His mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Ryan Douglas, 78, who splits her time between Florida and Wisconsin, will appear with him Saturday at The Villages, Fla., known as the world’s largest retirement community.

( Also on POLITICO: Mitt tries to explain Medicare stance)

Trying to disarm the weapon Democrats believe the Ryan pick handed them, Romney has begun to embrace the young congressman’s brand by talking increasingly about the ticket’s plans for reform, albeit in vaguer terms than the nitty-gritty that has been Ryan’s hallmark.

This new strategy reverses the campaign’s earlier rope-a-dope approach, which tried to keep the focus on President Barack Obama. On Thursday in Greer, S.C., Romney — no longer the candidate of patriotic hymns — used a whiteboard to contrast his Medicare plans with Obama’s.

To be sure, the debate is likely to be more sniping than substance — more attacks on Obama than parsing of the options for entitlement reform. Advisers say the campaign has no plans to pivot from its previous view that diving into details during a general-election race would be suicidal.

The Romney strategy is simple: Hammer away at Obama for proposing cuts to Medicare and promise, in vague, aspirational ways, to protect the program for future retirees — but don’t get pulled into a public discussion of the most unpopular parts of the Ryan plan.

“The nature of running a presidential campaign is that you’re communicating direction to the American people,” a Romney adviser said. “Campaigns that are about specifics, particularly in today’s environment, get tripped up.”

But aides believe there is a way for Romney and Ryan to present a vision of fiscal discipline so starkly different than Obama’s as to provide voters a clear choice, even without all the details.

“At the end of the day,” Rhoades said, “the American people are going to have to decide: Do they want to clean up the mess right now, or do they want to wait another four years, when it’s even worse? Do they want business as usual or do they really want to tackle the big challenges for a change?”

A Romney campaign official added: “I know there are some people in Washington, D.C., that are scared to talk about Medicare. We’re not. We’ve got a million hits on Medicare. We’ll do it for as long as they want. Let’s do it. It’s policy, it’s substance, it’s the future.”

The strategy carries significant risks: That approach could create confusion over Romney’s actual views on the Ryan plan — and an opening for Democrats to define the GOP nominee before he can define himself.

When CBS’s Bob Schieffer asked Romney on “60 Minutes” about the election becoming a referendum on Ryan’s budget plan, Romney replied: “Well, I have my budget plan, as you know, that I’ve put out. And that’s the budget plan that we’re going to run on.”

Romney said Wednesday that the two men are on the same page when it comes to Medicare. This was two days after he told reporters he assumed they were not on exactly the same page. “We’ll take a look at the differences,” Romney had told reporters in Florida on Monday.

But according to the campaign’s evolving thinking, resistance to talking about Medicare at all is “the old school, the old way of thinking.”

“Paul Ryan is a big-idea guy,” the Romney official said. “We’re going to be able to talk about policy and real issues. We need this race to be about bigger things, about the future of the country.”

Still, if you hoped that Romney’s selection of Ryan was going to touch off an epic war of ideas — maybe even with Ross-Perot-style charts and graphs — you’ll be badly disappointed.

“What you’re going to see is a campaign that has clear direction, but not a Simpson-Bowles or Ryan-budget level of detail,” the Romney adviser said. “It’s not only politically unwise to do that, but it’s not how the voters engage in a presidential campaign.”

Another risk is that the clarity of Ryan’s ideology and policy specifics are likely to become muddled. That could backfire politically if it alienates conservatives who are thrilled with the Ryan pick but could become grumpy if they feel he is being muzzled or constrained.

Romney’s longtime strategy clashes, in very fundamental ways, with the Ryan view of winning elections and arcane policy fights. Read Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker profile of Ryan and it’s unmistakably clear how the congressman believes it’s foolish, even cowardly, to duck the fine print of budget fights. “People like me who are reform-minded ignore the people who say, ‘Just criticize and don’t do anything and let’s win by default.’ That’s ridiculous,” he told Lizza.

The growing pains — and potential traps ahead for Romney and his running mate — were evident during Ryan’s first solo interview since the announcement. Brit Hume of Fox News, sitting down with Ryan on Tuesday in Denver, asked: “The budget plan that you are now supporting would get to balance when?”

“Well, there are different —,” Ryan began. “The budget plan that Mitt Romney’s supporting gets us down to 20 percent of GDP [gross domestic product] government spending by 2016. … I don’t know exactly when it balances. … I don’t want to get wonky on you, but we haven’t run the numbers on that specific plan. … The plans that we’ve offered in the House balance the budget.”

Later, Ryan balked when Hume pressed him on what loopholes the ticket would close through tax reform. “That is something that we think we should do in the light of day through Congress, unlike how Obamacare was passed,” Ryan dodged. “What the [House] Ways and Means Committee did, what the House passed, is to have a process for tax reform so that we do this in the front of the public.”

Many House Republicans are praying Romney will restrain Ryan’s impulse to plunge into a war of specifics. They worry a fight over turning the current Medicare system into one that offers a private option could be a disaster for their efforts to keep the House.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) held a private call this week with members to calm nerves about the Medicare issue — and his leadership team circulated a memo imploring candidates to use many of the generalities and Obama attacks Romney was road-testing with Ryan.