If you want to know how the choice of Paul Ryan as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate is playing around the country, you only have to look to how his House colleagues are reacting , especially those in difficult races.

“Linda McMahon will never support a budget that cuts Medicare,” said Corry Bliss, a spokesman for the leading Republican contender in a race for one of Connecticut’s U.S. Senate seats.

McMahon’s camp was reacting to a statement sent out by Rep. Chris Murphy, a Democrat running for the same Senate seat, that asked, “Mitt Romney Picks Paul Ryan – Does Linda McMahon?” [...]

Even before Ryan’s selection, Reps. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-N.Y., Rick Crawford, R-Ark., were urging older voters in their districts not to fear the Ryan plan, depicting it as little more than a guide with no binding legal authority, and noting, encouragingly, that Democrats in the Senate simply won’t pass it.

Still, Buerkle’s opponent – former Rep. Dan Maffei, whom she defeated narrowly in 2010 – jumped Saturday on Ryan’s selection to paint the “Ryan-Buerkle vision” for America as one in which the middle-class pays higher taxes and “don’t have Medicare as we know it, and women don’t have right to life saving health care.”

You’re seeing this up and down the board . Every Democratic candidate with half a chance in November is yoking their opponent to Paul Ryan at every opportunity. They’re basically running the Kathy Hochul strategy . She won a R+6 district in upstate New York almost entirely on the 2011 Ryan budget, particularly Medicare. Fellow New Yorker Steve Israel runs the DCCC, and he’s clearly advised his candidates to use that blueprint. And Republicans are nervous about it .

In this context, the attempt to turn the tables and

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