I heard through the grapevine that Republican apparatchiks had lost control of the Romney speech, and now I can see what it was all about. Mitt Romney is thinking ‘If John McCain loses, the party is going to be tired of mavericks. They’ll want a hard right-winger, and that will be me!“ He drifted so far right, I’m sort of, my mind is boggling. Who was this guy? I remember a few years ago, a moderate Republican, but he’s made a strategic choice. That is as right-wing a speech as we’ll hear, maybe as right-wing a speech as we’ve heard at a Republican convention in many conventions.

David Brooks on Mitt Romney’s speech at the 2008 Republican convention

He’d like the parts that are politically sensitive, which he does disagree with, to not own the whole thing. But he owns the major elements. He owns drastically reducing the size of the federal government, drastically changing how Medicare works, and drastically altering the tax code where the richest Americans would get a big tax break.

Mark Halperin, on how much of Paul Ryan’s budget plan Mitt Romney “owns.”