If you believe everything you hear, both sides are absolutely ecstatic over Republican Mitt Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan to be his running mate this fall.

Republicans – especially the conservative wing of the party – are happy because Ryan brings bona fide budget-cutting credentials to the table as the chairman of the House Budget Committee and architect of the GOP’s budget blueprint.

Democrats are giddy because they can now easily link Romney to the controversial budget plan, which includes turning Medicare into a voucher program and raises the eligibility age from 65 to 67 in 2023.

Well, here’s something all Americans should be happy about: The selection of Ryan may just be the impetus needed to transform what has been a vacuous presidential campaign from a juvenile food fight (“Romney Hood,” “Obamaloney,” etc.) into a substantive policy discussion about the nation’s economic and budgetary challenges.

Medicare. Medicaid. Trillion-dollar budget deficits. A $15.9 trillion national debt. The expiring George W. Bush tax cuts. Spending cuts tied to the sequestration deal agreed to by Congress. In short, a grown-up discussion about the future role of the federal government in the day-to-day lives of the American people.

That’s what is behind a national movement to persuade the Commission on Presidential Debates to dedicate one of this fall’s debates as a forum in which both President Barack Obama and Romney can lay out in detail how they intend to achieve between $4 trillion and $6 trillion in savings over the next decade.

Along those lines, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has created an online petition (http://debatethedebt.org) calling for just that – more than 19,000 signatures as of Monday afternoon – and a bipartisan group of senators formally has put that request in writing to the commission.

On Aug. 1, Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut urged the commission to set aside one of the debates strictly to discuss the national debt.

That prompted a similar letter of support to the commission signed by the two co-chairs of the nonpartisan Campaign to Fix the Debt – former New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, a Republican, and former Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell, a Democrat. They were joined by Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Bill Clinton, and Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Currently, three presidential debates are planned: Oct. 3 (domestic policy); Oct. 16 (town hall on foreign and domestic policy) and Oct. 22 (foreign policy.)

For many New Hampshire residents, this is hardly a philosophical exercise. More than 208,000 residents – one out of every five – were receiving an average benefit of $9,155 under the federal Medicare program, according to 2011 figures compiled by the Alliance for Retired Americans. Roughly 160,000 were getting $8,333 on average under the federal-state Medicaid program.

We will defer to the pundits on whether Romney’s selection of Ryan was “presidential” (Washington Post columnist George W. Will) or a “disaster” (Daily Kos’ Dick Morris).

But if Ryan’s presence on the GOP ticket can bring some substance to this heretofore substanceless campaign, that would be beneficial to Americans of all political persuasions.

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