Mitt Romney finally caught up with the rest of us via a fiery speech in Ohio on Tuesday where he proclaimed three simple truths that frame Barack Obama: "Intellectually exhausted, out of ideas, and out of energy."

Those lines are still too charitable; Obama has been intellectually barren from the beginning.  Yet it is irrefutable -- to steal an apt word from Paul Ryan describing Obama's raiding Medicare to finance ObamaCare -- that Obama's idea inventory consists of the expired date-stamped perishables of the collectivist state -- tax, confiscate, redistribute, and impoverish.

"Out of energy" indeed will be our deficit of destiny if Obama's agenda persists to underwrite wind, solar, and ethanol while blocking coal, oil, and gas.  Yet Obama has no shortage of personal energy to govern and campaign on a platform of "division ... diversion ... anger ... hate ... defaming ... and demagoguery."

The MSM liberal apologists were quick to label Romney's pick of Paul Ryan as VP an "act of desperation."  Such an attributed motivation is an unintended moment of truth.  Yes, we are desperate.

Desperate to rescue a nation quickly devolving into an ungovernable economic catastrophe.  Desperate to repudiate a culture of  institutionalized dependency, where class envy substitutes for sweat equity.  Desperate to reclaim a society where individual achievement and initiative are admired, not punished.  Desperate to restore common decency in political discourse, where ideas triumph over ad hominems.  Desperate to avoid the "Road to Serfdom," a looming certainty if Obama's legacy prevails.

Finding one's voice can arrive in a variety of modes, sometimes unexpectedly.  Mitt Romney found his voice in Paul Ryan.  This is not to diminish Mitt Romney for discovering his timbre too late or "outsourcing courage," but rather to credit him with wisdom in aligning his own ambition with clarity on how to get there.

Paul Ryan represents everything that Obama and the Democrats will never be: intellectually fertile, economically and historically literate, unimpeachably rigorous and honest.  And these are only Paul Ryan's character virtues.  His ideas and convictions are even better.  And he's the most likeable politician in town.

Clarity is a rarely used tonic.  The word itself has yet to be overexposed and deliberately obfuscated, unlike the word transparent.  Of course, the phrase "let me be perfectly clear" is usually a prelude to anything but -- it was first attributed to Richard Nixon, then expropriated by Bill Clinton, and now it is a common preamble to Barack Obama's frequent deceptions.  Yet clarity is a refreshingly bracing noun in an age where deliberate distortions, bald-faced lies, shameless plagiarism, and muddled thinking have become the new normal.

Mitt Romney's clarity, revealing his identity as a leader, was the act of choosing Paul Ryan.  The Paul Ryan choice was liberating.  This is uncharted territory for Romney, whose reputation as a cautious, circumspect, and conventional politician should have foreclosed such a move.

The stakes are arguably just as vital, though very different on an immediate human scale, as when General Eisenhower launched D-Day on June 5, 1944.  Ike had two dominant traits:  a knack for choosing very capable lieutenants and another for undertaking only those battles small enough to win but big enough to matter.

Until D-Day, when opportunity and necessity appeared in a fleetingly narrow window, Ike took them both to destiny with three simple words: "OK, let's go!"  Did Romney need Ike's meteorologist to tell him when the weather would be ripe to launch his own reckoning with history, and when such a moment would pass?

No, a weather report would be superfluous.  Just stick your head out the door and smell the ozone.  Twenty-three million unemployed (and counting), trillions in deficits,  economic stagnation, regulatory calcification, despair and defeat in the air, daily doses of bitter plumes from a president who disparages America's greatness and sees its culture only through a filter of race and class resentment. 

Meanwhile, every day presents another Obama profile in economic illiteracy.  His latest absurdity is advocating higher supports for falling cattle and pork prices as animals are being slaughtered early to avoid paying for corn-based feedstock, the price of which has skyrocketed due to the drought -- a catastrophe exacerbated by 40% of the corn crop being diverted to ethanol for fuel.  Romney's moment for clarity couldn't arrive soon enough.

Romney's version of "OK, let's go!" with Paul Ryan has unveiled a newfound clarity, giving voters their own renewed voice of optimism, opportunity, and uplift.  Liberated from identity politics and collectivist propaganda, voters can now boldly reject re-electing an imposter who is "Intellectually Bereft,  Idea-Bound by Collectivist Deprivation, and Whose Energy is Devoted to Dividing, Diminishing, and Disparaging."