Telling Romney apart from Ryan

In yesterday's column, Gail Collins tells us how to keep track of which one is Romney and which one is Ryan - on the issues:

Ryan is the one who requested stimulus money for his district, but he is sorry. The stimulus was a terrible thing, and Ryan had no intention of trying to glom onto a chunk of it. He thought he was just forwarding a constituent request for some ... constituent thing. Or four.

Romney is the one who hired undocumented workers to mow his lawn. Totally by mistake.

Ryan is the one who voted for a massive prescription drug Medicare entitlement, the Bush tax cuts and two wars without paying for any of them. He is even sorrier about this than he is about the stimulus.

Romney is the one who passed Obamacare before Obama. But it wasn’t the same thing at all because it happened in a state.

Both men want to make more big tax cuts that will be paid for with the closing of tax loopholes. They are in total, complete concurrence that the identity of these loopholes is not an appropriate topic for a presidential campaign.

Romney has a plan to make Medicare solvent forever. We know this because he wrote “Solvent” on the board at a press conference the other day.

Ryan used to have a plan to make Medicare solvent forever by taking it away from everybody under age 55 and giving them health insurance vouchers instead. But that was so 2011.

Now, Ryan and Romney are on the same page when it comes to Medicare, which is that it must be saved from the $716 billion in cuts President Obama wants to make over the next 10 years. Although that same $716 billion was in the budget plan that Ryan got the House to pass this year. But it’s not like he expected it to happen. “We would never have done it,” he [says].

And she never mentioned the dog!