Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan just wrapped up his event at Kirkwood College in Cedar Rapids, the first stop in a two-day swing through Iowa.

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Added clips from Ryan’s rally in Adel.

I didn’t catch all of the livestream, but Ryan repeatedly told the crowd, “We can do this. We can get this country on the right track.” That’s the message Ryan and presidential candidate Mitt Romney need to convey, because national polls continue to show a majority of Americans believe the country is “on the wrong track.”

President Barack Obama’s job is to convince voters that although they may not be better off than they were four years ago, his plan to get things moving in the right direction will be more effective and fair than what Romney and Ryan advocate.

I will update this post later with more excerpts from Ryan’s speech.

Governor Terry Branstad was in Cedar Rapids today and had high praise for Ryan during an interview with Radio Iowa’s Dar Danielson.

He talked about Ryan’s performance at last week’s Republican National Convention.

“Well first of all I thought he did a phenomenal job. I think he’s a very courageous guy,…he’s the only one I know of in the Congress that put together a comprehensive plan to address the biggest problem facing America,” Branstad says.

“And that is this massive increase in the national debt, which has gone up more than a trillion dollars a year, every year that Obama’s been president.”

Branstad says Ryan has an Iowa connection. “I was on the floor of the convention for his speech. He pointed out he comes from a very humble background, Janesville, Wisconsin, it’s not too far from Dubuque. His father graduated from Loras College, but his father died when he was 19. He’s a guy who has worked hard his whole life,” Branstad says.

Tomorrow morning, Ryan is scheduled to headline a campaign rally in Adel. Maximizing Republican turnout in places like Dallas County will be essential for the Romney campaign, especially if this year’s election resembles 2004, as many strategists in both parties expect.

Members of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement disrupted Ryan’s first campaign event here during the Iowa State Fair. Iowa CCI’s Executive Director Hugh Espey told the Cedar Rapids Gazette that the group will not back off from confrontational tactics used occasionally since the 1970s. I tend to think a little of that goes a long way. Interrupting a speaker or holding eye-catching signs may help put an issue on the agenda, but continuing to disrupt a speaker puts the attention on tactics rather than substantive issues.

I’ll update this post after the jump with longer excerpts from his speech.

UPDATE: The Washington Post blog has a photo of the Romney campaign’s huge ARE YOU BETTER OFF? banners, with the Obama campaign’s sunrise “O” logo in the word “off.”

Ten demerits to KCRG TV for describing the crowd as “larger than expected” but not providing a crowd estimate. They did broadcast an interview with Ryan here. He dwelled on the federal debt, which reached an estimated $16 trillion today, and said we have to reform entitlement programs for younger generations “so we don’t go broke.” He asserted that we can solve the debt problem with a three-pronged approach that increases economic growth, cuts domestic discretionary spending, and entitlement reforms.

Ryan is smart, so I think he knows that domestic discretionary spending isn’t large enough to balance the federal budget by cutting those programs. Try it yourself on this interactive budget-balancing tool; you can’t balance the budget without at least some military spending cuts as well as tax increases.

Ryan did a good job staying on message in the interview, driving home the point that we need a change in leadership if we’re going to fix the country’s economic problems.

Asked about wind energy in Iowa, Ryan said “We believe in an all of the above energy policy,” including wind, but he said Republicans want a level playing field for all producers. That’s disingenuous, because Romney is not proposing to end all the federal tax incentives that benefit fossil fuel producers. Why eliminate the wind energy production tax credit, then?

SECOND UPDATE: From the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

“President Obama, to be charitable, he came into office with a very difficult situation,” Ryan told the crowd. “Here’s the problem: He made things worse. He’s run out of ideas. And he cannot run on his record. That’s why he’s relegated his campaign to a campaign based on the politics of envy and division, smear and fear.”

From KWWL.com:

Paul Ryan spent the beginning of his speech connecting with the audience, sharing his own Midwestern roots.

His mother-in-law even lives in Clinton.

But he quickly switched gears and spent the rest of the speech critiquing President Obama and talking about the Romney/Ryan plan.

He reminded the audience that if elected president, Mitt Romney will repeal “Obamacare,” which the Republican ticket believes hurts Medicare.

The two do plan to change the government program for seniors by giving younger people choices of coverage options.

“We should not change benefit for people who are in or near retirement,” said Ryan.   “In order to keep that promise, and prevent Medicare from going bankrupt in the future, we have to change it for our generation.”

Early in his speech, Ryan criticized the Obama administration for allowing the national debt to hit $16 trillion on Tuesday.

One point of the five part Romney/Ryan Plan for a Stronger Middle Class is to cut spending.

“We could get Americans back to work,” said Ryan.  “We can get prosperity back in this country, get growth back in this country. And have all the things we need to do to prevent a debt crisis from taking us down the European path, we need economic growth.”

The other four parts of the Romney/Ryan plan are:

championing small businesses

creating job training benefits

increasing trade

utilizing American-made energy

Ryan also referenced the $16 trillion national debt during his Cedar Rapids speech: “this debt is threatening jobs today, it’s threatening prosperity today, and it is guaranteeing that our children and grandchildren get a diminished future.”

WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Click here to watch the full video of Ryan in Cedar Rapids. Although he’s wrong about almost everything, I think he is an effective surrogate for Romney.

Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds and U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley were on hand to introduce Ryan in Adel on Wednesday morning. Again, Ryan told the Iowa audience, “we come from the same place.”

“I tell you, I feel like I’m standing 10 miles from my house in Janesville, Wisconsin, right now,” he said.

It was a similar message to the one that Ryan delivered in Cedar Rapids on Tuesday afternoon.

“I don’t come from east of here; I come from northeast of here,” Ryan said in his Tuesday speech. “I come from Janesville, Wisconsin, an hour-and-a-half drive from Dubuque. This really does feel like home. I come from the corn-and-soybean part of Wisconsin. That’s our country. We are kindred spirits here. My mother-in-law is from Clinton, Iowa, right down the road. Janna and our kids have been coming to Clinton to visit family there.”

Economic themes dominated his stump speech.

“It doesn’t matter which generation you come from, this is the most important election of your lifetime,” Ryan told about 750 supporters on the courthouse square here. “We really are at that proverbial fork in the road. This is a defining moment. This is not just about jobs, just about economic growth. It is about the kind of people we want to be, the kind of country we want to have.”

Ryan repeated the argument he offered yesterday in Cedar Rapids, asking Iowans whether they were better off now than they were four years ago and blaming Obama for stubborn high unemployment, declining household incomes and other indicators of economic stagnation.

“Are we going to stay on the path that President Obama has put us on, or are we going to turn this thing around, win this election and get country back on right track?” he asked the crowd.

Ryan also echoed a Romney accusation about Obama’s policy on welfare reform. The Obama administration announced plans this summer to make it easier for states to receive waivers from certain provisions in the 1996 welfare reform law. Romney has been running misleading television commercials claiming that Obama is gutting the work requirements of welfare.

Speaking in Adel today, Ryan alluded to tonight’s scheduled Democratic National Convention speech by President Bill Clinton:

“My guess is we’ll get a great rendition of how good things were in the 1990s, but we’re not going to hear much about how things have been in the last four years,” Ryan, speaking before a crowd of several hundred in this small town west of Des Moines, said of Clinton’s upcoming speech. “And by the way, under President Clinton, we got welfare reform … which moved people from welfare to work, to get people out of poverty. President Obama is rolling back welfare reform.”

That kind of comment illustrates the phenomenon Gregory Krieg of ABC News describes today:

And yet, less than four weeks since being introduced as Mitt Romney’s running mate, Ryan has given rise to a furious fact-check revolution, with analysts saying his claims — about everything from Health Care reform to his best marathon time — could imperil what many had painted as his cardinal virtue — honesty. […]

“I think what this does is create a reputation as Ryan not being terribly different than how the public perceives any other politician,” Geoffrey D. Peterson, the director of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s Political Research Institute, told ABC News. “So, I think it would make it more difficult for Ryan to portray himself as ‘the last honest man in Washington’ in the future than he might have been able to six weeks ago.”

LATER UPDATE: Radio Iowa’s Dar Danielson posted the audio and highlights from Ryan’s event in Adel. He admitted that Obama inherited difficult economic circumstances:

“The problem is, he didn’t make anything better. He can’t run on his record and so that is why he has run out of ideas and why he is running the type of campaign he is running – based on the politics of envy and division. Hope and change have now become attack and blame.”

He says Obama’s took the wrong step by pushing through the stimulus package.

“They promised that if we borrow all this money and spent it through all these government agencies, unemployment would never get about eight percent. It hasn’t been below eight percent since then,” Ryan says.

“And then he quickly turned to a partisan government takeover of our health care system Medicare is being threatened by Obamacare.” Ryan also recalled “Joe the Plumber” from the last campaign and said it showed President Obama’s philosophy of redistributing wealth.

“It’s this sort of school of thought that the money in America is finite, it’s fixed. And that it’s government’s job to redistribute the slices of the pie however elites in government think it ought to be done,” Ryan explains. “That is not who we are. Our job is to set the conditions for growth and opportunity so that we can grow the pie so everybody can get a bigger slice of the pie. That’s what we do in this country.”

What Ryan didn’t acknowledge: unemployment would have been even higher without the stimulus package, and state governments would have been forced to make even deeper budget cuts during the “Great Recession.”