In the matter of Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to be his running mate, I keep flashing on images of Wallace Shawn in “The Princess Bride”: Inconceivable!
Here’s a rule of thumb: If you are the Republican nominee and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, The Weekly Standard and National Review are all urging you to do the same thing, run the other way. Romney doesn’t need the base; if they are not enthusiastically for him, they are enthusiastically against Obama, which ought to be enough.
Romney needs independents in Virginia, suburban women in Colorado, seniors in Florida. It’s not a question of whether Ryan will help him woo these voters; it’s a matter of whether Ryan — especially once the Obama campaign and associated super PACs get through with him — will make that even harder.
On the plus side, Ryan is smart, engaging, charismatic, young. He’s got good chemistry with Romney. He’s serious and committed without being off-putting or intractably partisan. Democrats who’ve worked with Ryan like and respect him.
But selecting him as the veep candidate doesn’t make sense. It undercuts several aspects of the Romney narrative.
Romney is the outside Washington candidate — now running with a sitting member of a body with a 12 percent approval rating. He’s the private sector fix-it guy-now with a career politician.
Most important, the choice of Ryan pushes against what has been the central theory of Romney’s campaign: Make it less of a choice between himself and Obama and more of a referendum on the incumbent president and the languishing economy.
Instead, substitute endless debate and wall-to-wall advertising on every last detail of every plan Ryan has ever put out: to add private accounts to Social Security, to change Medicare into a voucher program, to slash domestic spending to unimaginably bare-bones levels.
Why would Romney take on a fight that President Obama has been itching to have? Here was Obama in April, running against what then seemed his pipe dream ticket of Romney-Ryan: “The Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract With America look like the New Deal. In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget ‘radical’ and said it would contribute to ‘right-wing social engineering.’ … This is now the party’s governing platform.
“This is what they’re running on. One of my potential opponents, Gov. Romney, has said that he hoped a similar version of this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill on day one of his presidency. He said that he’s ‘very supportive’ of this new budget, and he even called it ‘marvelous’ — which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget.”
This is the fall conversation that Romney wants to enable?
I don’t get it. The argument for going bold, shifting gears, throwing long balls — insert cliché here — would be if the Romney campaign has concluded that it has lost the campaign-as-referendum-on-Obama argument and is panicking. But a spate of problematic national and swing stage polls notwithstanding, that seems way, way premature to me. It seems way, way premature to many Democratic strategists I’ve spoken to since the announcement.
The Ryan choice means I get to wallow in Congressional Budget Office analyses and Tax Policy Center distributional tables. It should make for a more interesting and more substantive campaign — one that may better prepare the country for the difficult fiscal choices facing the next president. I just don’t see how it helps Mitt Romney secure that job.
Source: R. Marcus
“I don’t get it. The argument for going bold, shifting gears, throwing long balls — insert cliché here — would be if the Romney campaign has concluded that it has lost the campaign-as-referendum-on-Obama argument and is panicking.” (Editor,CCO)
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Editor:
I do not read it that way at all. It is simply not enough to show how screwed up and clueless Obama has been, not only about the economy and capitalism in general, but also on foreign policy.
You have to convince the electorate that you fully understand the issues and you have a plan that you are convinced will work to make things better.
When you compare Romney and Ryan to Obama and Biden on the economy and foreign policy, there really is no comparison and four years of the Obama administration has convinced most thinking people that another four years of the same might do irreversible harm to the country.
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We did not author that article. It is a republication.
then you should have given credit to the original author for clarification, not claiming it was by editor
Source cited at bottom of page. The blue editor is a default setting in WordPress for who posted it not who wrote it.
As for the question currently on your Reader’s Poll, I would add a third option:
The United States Citizens.
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If the 2008 election taught us anything it is that too many voters prefer a presidential candidate who makes them feel good about themselves. In 2008 this logic gave too many people the false impression that they were smart for voting for The Messiah, who turned out to be a lot more of a mess than a savior. Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan is a very good one, but it is suboptimal given that the vice-presidential candidate we need is Governor Mark Rubio. If Rubio had been chosen the Republicans would have easily wrapped up the largest single minority group in the U.S. Romney can not win without a majority of the Hispanic vote, simply because we have reached the entitlement tipping point: nearly half of the population of the United States depends on the United States government for entitlement goodies of one kind or another. If Romney had chosen Rubio The Messiah would be on the ropes now, simply because all of the voter enthusiasm would be in the hands of the Republicans. We already know that every ethic group in the United States is disappointed in Obama in one way or another (ask any Black person if they got even half of what they expected from The Messiah).
Is there any democrat getting this issue even close to how Ryan gets it?
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