For Ryan's First Solo Outing as Candidate, a Soapbox Appearance at the Iowa State Fair

DES MOINES — Representative Paul D. Ryan is going solo, and for his first outing alone as the Republican vice-presidential candidate he has chosen a particularly exposed high-wire appearance: a political soapbox at the Iowa State Fair.

Mr. Ryan, who parted ways with Mitt Romney in Milwaukee on Sunday evening after two days of joint campaigning, will appear Monday afternoon at a locale famous for unscripted give-and-takes with skeptical voters.

A year ago, Mr. Romney was challenged by the crowd at the Iowa State Fair and blurted out, “Corporations are people, my friend,” a line that came to haunt him.

The soapbox, on the Grand Concourse, is sponsored by The Des Moines Register. By tradition a candidate gets 20 minutes to speak and often takes questions from the crowd. Mr. Ryan, who excels at town-hall-style events in which his mastery of policy is on display, will have the opportunity to show his grace under pressure.

Last year, while still just one of many Republican contenders, Mr. Romney was aggressively challenged on his assertions about Medicare, Social Security and taxes. A heckler shouted a remark about corporations. “Corporations are people, my friend,” Mr. Romney replied. “Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.”

The lines achieved YouTube immortality and were repeated by critics to show Mr. Romney’s supposed indifference to the little guy.

It was also one of rare events at which Mr. Romney took questions from an audience not composed of supporters controlled by his campaign.

On Saturday, Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa said he would escort Mr. Ryan around the fair. Most of the state’s Congressional candidates are scheduled to speak on the soapbox this week. Tom Vilsack, the United States agriculture secretary, is to speak on behalf of President Obama on Tuesday morning.

While Mr. Ryan is from a neighboring state, Wisconsin, he is one of the few leading Republican figures who has rarely visited Iowa. When asked last year why he was a stranger, he said he didn’t want to raise suspicions about his own political intentions.

Mr. Obama will also be in Iowa on Monday, beginning a three-day visit that will take him to many communities in the battle ground state – but so far, not to the State Fair soapbox.

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Obama Says He Fundamentally Disagrees With Ryan's Vision for the Country

CHICAGO — President Obama addressed his rival’s vice-presidential choice for the first time on Sunday, calling Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin a nice guy whose leadership would be a national disaster.

“Congressman Ryan is a decent man, he is a family man,” the president said, quieting boos from the audience, but also a spokesman “for a vision I fundamentally disagree with.”

Speaking to hundreds of young supporters at the second of five fund-raising events he is holding here Sunday, Mr. Obama wove Mr. Ryan seamlessly into the speech he has been making for months. In a sense, Mr. Ryan has made Mr. Obama’s rhetorical job easy: for months, the president has argued that the election is a choice between two different paths for the country, and that the Romney/Ryan path of aggressive budget cutting and deregulation will lead to yet more economic suffering. So he dropped just a few words about Mr. Ryan into his address, describing the anxiety and insecurity he said Mr. Ryan’s proposed policies would cause.

“It’s not speculation, it’s on their Web sites,” he said. “They have tried this before, they have tried to sell us this trickle down fairy dust before.”

Through an accident of timing, Mr. Obama finds himself back in the places that created his career — Chicago and Iowa — just as the fight to defend his presidency takes on new definition. Sunday’s events provided a miniature snapshot of the president’s fortunes at the moment. On the one hand, his central argument — that the election is a choice between two visions for the country — received a shot of rhetorical energy from Mitt Romney’s selection of Mr. Ryan, who has argued for changes to Medicaid and Medicare as a way of cutting the deficit.

On the other hand, Mr. Obama is trailing in the money, and his Chicago “birthday” trip is a frenetic dash for cash, from the large, low-dollar event at the arts center to a party in his own backyard with a $40,000 admissions fee.

The Obama campaign does not release fund-raising tallies for individual events, but a simple series of numbers tells the story of their efforts to raise cash. The president and the first lady are dividing and conquering, with Mr. Obama in Chicago and the first lady covering the Rocky Mountains and California over the course of several days. Admission to the arts center was low, with some supporters admitted for as little as $51, a bargain price to see a sitting president up close. Though the Obama campaign declared the event sold out, the loftlike space looked about half full. (A campaign official later said that a thousand donors attended, beyond initial expectations.) Meanwhile, Mark Knoller of CBS, an unofficial archivist of the presidency, said he could not remember another occasion in which a sitting United States president held a fund-raiser in his own home.

The arts center event also provided an unplanned contrast with Saturday’s scene at Mr. Romney’s announcement. That took place on the decommissioned U.S.S. Wisconsin in Virginia, in front of what looked like a mostly white crowd. The Bridgeport Art Center sits on a barren block of Chicago’s South Side, and Mr. Obama spoke front of a diverse, young audience.

Just outside, another reminder of the politics of Chicago’s South Side was visible on the sidewalk. Members of Chicago’s Occupy Wall Street group covered the pavement with chalked statements of protest: “Unhappy 51 to Obama,” the pastel message said. “Stop killing brown people with your drones.”

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Romney Team Hints at More Openness on Ryan's Tax Records

DULLES, Va. — A top aide to Mitt Romney said that the campaign had obtained “several years” of income tax returns from potential running mates – suggesting that Representative Paul D. Ryan had produced tax returns for a greater number of years than Mr. Romney has in his run for the White House.

Mitt Romney has repeatedly refused to disclose tax returns for any years but 2010 and 2011, stirring criticism that he is shielding his finances from public view.

But on Saturday, the Romney adviser who oversaw the vice-presidential search, Beth Myers, said that she had requested “several years” of returns from Mr. Ryan. When pressed on precisely how many she had received, she declined to elaborate.

But her choice of words, however vague, was telling: she said “several,” not two, or a couple. (Technically, several refers to more than two.)

President Obama’s re-election campaign has hammered Mr. Romney for not releasing enough of his tax returns, attempting to portray him as a calculating businessman set on hiding his wealth and tax rate. Because Mr. Romney earned much of his money through something known as carried interest – a form of return on investments – when at Bain Capital, he paid a lower tax rate than he might have had he worked in a different profession.

Mr. Romney has said that releasing two years of tax returns is plenty and that he is following a precedent set by presidential candidates like Senator John McCain in 2008.

Mr. Romney’s own father, however, released 12 years of tax returns when he was considering a run for president in 1967. And in 2008, Mr. Romney himself gave Mr. McCain 23 years of his tax returns when being vetted as a possible running mate.

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