Ryan ties Hagan to Obama in NC stop

WINGATE, N.C. — Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) tied Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) to President Obama in a campaign stop for North Carolina Speaker Thom Tillis (R), accusing her of rubber-stamping the president’s agenda while touting Tillis as a can-do leader.

{mosads}”We need leaders who are going to step up and step in front of our country’s problems and solve our country’s problems before they get out of our control. Thom Tillis has already proven to us, he’s already shown by what he has done in public service that he is that kind of a leader,” the former vice presidential nominee told an audience of fewer than 100 at Wingate University, a small liberal arts college an hour east of Charlotte. 

Ryan accused Hagan of following Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), blaming them for Congress’s inability to get much done and attacking them on national security.

“Why would you want to return someone who votes 96 percent of the time with these policies that have already been proven to fail?” he asked after hitting Hagan on sequestration and ObamaCare. “America is safe when America is strong, and America is strong when we have a strong military, the strongest military the world has ever known. But that’s not what we’re getting from this administration.”

Tillis pounced on Hagan’s refusal to attend a debate against him on Tuesday evening — he instead got the full hour to talk to reporters on television next to an empty chair.

“In fairness, I think it was her best performance yet,” he said to laughs from the crowd. “The debates really defined what this campaign is about. Sen. Hagan in three consecutive debates could not find a single thing that she would do differently.”

The GOP nominee has been trailing Hagan by a small margin in most polls since the mid-summer, but Republicans believe he’s built momentum over the last two weeks by focusing on foreign policy and national security and think what had been a steady gap between them is closing fast.

Tillis surprisingly didn’t explicitly mention ISIS or Ebola, two issues he’s hit hard on recently, but compared the U.S.’s standing in the world to the late 1970s, implicitly comparing Obama to former President Jimmy Carter.

“What you’re seeing right now is the depth we’ve been to before. The United States back in the ’70s were in these times. Russia was going wherever they wanted to go, invading sovereign nations. Hostages were being taken in the Middle East. Americans were being killed by terrorists,” he told the students in the audience. “We’re coming out of the same circumstances we were in when I was your age.”