Campaign 2012 now enters into a new phase. Presumptive Republican Presidential nominee has selected Rep. Paul Ryan to be his running mate. Now the question becomes will Ryan – a darling of conservatives, Tea Party members and talk show hosts — will help Romney get some of the votes he needs to win the Oval Office job or whether Ryan will turn out to be another Sara Palin like pick by a nominee: a seemingly hail Mary that fizzed on voting day.
Opinions are now split and — no surprise here — opinions are oftened colored by whether someone has a D or R as their party affilitiation. Here’s an extensive cross section of news, website, and blog reaction to Romney’s pick:
The curtain is just rising on the introduction of Mitt Romney’s Paul Ryan Vice Presidential play and we have already heard from many corners about his potential strengths and weaknesses. I would like to focus on something more fundamental that this pick tells us. Mitt Romney and his campaign have decided strategically that this election is a base election and it is about motivating Republicans and conservatives and not about persuading swing voters.
This Ryan pick isn’t going to help close the gap with Latino voters. This isn’t going to persuade suburban, middle class moms to support the ticket. This pick is an acknowledgement on the Romney campaign’s part that they see their only path to victory as motivating their base.
The curtain is just rising on the introduction of Mitt Romney’s Paul Ryan Vice Presidential play and we have already heard from many corners about his potential strengths and weaknesses. I would like to focus on something more fundamental that this pick tells us. Mitt Romney and his campaign have decided strategically that this election is a base election and it is about motivating Republicans and conservatives and not about persuading swing voters.
This Ryan pick isn’t going to help close the gap with Latino voters. This isn’t going to persuade suburban, middle class moms to support the ticket. This pick is an acknowledgement on the Romney campaign’s part that they see their only path to victory as motivating their base.
We have seen some evidence of this effort to motivate the base from the tactics of the Romney campaign over the last few months, but I think this pick is a clear signal that this is their strategy for the remaining days ahead. And I don’t think they will be subtle any more about it. I think you will see analysis from them that they can win this election without increasing support among Latinos or by having progressive social appeals to suburban moms.
I think they have decided that a lesson learned about base motivation from Bush’s 2004 race is applicable in 2012, and it isn’t surprising since many of their key staff worked on that campaign.
Time will tell whether this strategic choice is a good one.
David Frum (added in later update of this post) is must reading. He sites five possible reasons why Romney may have made the choice:
1) Like many Republicans, Mitt Romney has been genuinely radicalized since 2008…..
2) Romney’s internal polling shows that he is not holding the GOP base….
3) The donors demanded it. Romney is raising huge sums of super PAC money from comparatively few people….
4) Romney may be thinking ahead to after the election….
5) Romney may just have crumbled and yielded to pressure.
He then writes:
When I air skepticism about this pick, I get push-back from overjoyed conservatives. On Ryan’s behalf, it must be said: he’s intelligent, serious-minded, and refreshingly sincere. In character, Paul Ryan is everything one would want in a national political leader.
Yet it’s also true that Ryan has been pushed forward by people who do not much like or respect Mitt Romney, precisely with a view to constraining and controlling a Romney presidency. By acceding to that pressure—for whichever of the five reasons above, or for some sixth or seventh reason—Romney has transformed a campaign about jobs and growth into a campaign about entitlements and Medicare. Romney will now have to spend the next months explaining how and why shrinking Medicare after 2023 will create prosperity in 2013. Economic conditions are so tough—the Obama reelection proposition is so weak—that Romney may win anyway. But wow, the job just got harder.
Ezra Klein (as reports came out that Romney would pick Ryan) offered this list of what the pick would mean. I’ve greatly edited them down so go to the link to read them in full:
1. Both Democrats and conservatives are going to get the exact debate they wanted. I’m not so sure about Republicans.
2. This is an admission of fear from the Romney campaign…..
3. Related point: Two of the top contenders in the Romney campaign’s veepstakes were Ohio’s Rob Portman and Florida’s Marco Rubio. Given that there’s fairly good evidence that vice presidential candidates are worth at least a point or two in their home states, the Romney campaign’s decision to pick Ryan is evidence that they feel they need to change the national dynamic, not just pick off a battleground state.
4. Romney’s original intention was to make the 2012 election a referendum on President Obama’s management of the economy. Ryan makes it a choice between two competing plans for deficit reduction. This election increasingly resembles the Obama campaign’s strategy rather than the Romney campaign’s strategy.
5. It’s worth recalling how Ryan became a semi-household name. It wasn’t a Republican strategy to put him forward. As Ryan Lizza recounts in his New Yorker profile of Ryan, it was a Democratic strategy to put Ryan forward….
6. Consider the case for Romney until today: He’s a relatively moderate businessman running because his experience in the private-sector gives him crucial insight into how to manage the economy. Now consider Ryan: He’s worked in politics his entire life, beginning as an aide to Sen. Bob Kasten, then working for Sen. Sam Brownback and as a speechwriter to Rep. Jack Kemp. He’s known as a relatively ideological politician who has put forward a detailed policy plan to remake the federal government….
7. Ryan upends Romney’s whole strategy. Until now, Romney’s play has been very simple: Don’t get specific. …..
8. It’s not just that Romney now has to defend Ryan’s budget. To some degree, that was always going to be true. What he will now have to defend is everything else Ryan has proposed.,,,,
9. Joe Biden has a lot of debate prep ahead of him…. Democrats underestimate his political skills at their peril.
10. Everyone always says they want an election focused on the issues. For better or worse, we’ve got one.
Go to the link to read it in full.
The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky:
Paul Ryan? Really? It’s a stunning choice. A terrible one too. By making it, Mitt Romney tells America that he is not his own man and hasn’t even the remotest fleeting desire to be his own man. He is owned by the right wing. Did I write a couple of weeks ago that Romney was insecure? Well—Q.E.D….
…..Democrats are celebrating. Are they overdoing it? Ryan is smart. He’ll hold his own on the trail. He’ll talk about the fiscal cliff coming at the end of the year, and he’ll probably make as credible a case as any conservative can make that Obama won’t make the “tough choices” and Republicans will. And don’t forget that he has a grudge against Obama personally, ever since that George Washington University speech of Obama’s in April 2011 when he invited Ryan—and made the guy sit there and listen to the president of the United States trash him. That’s probably a motivator. And the Democrats might overplay their hand. That’s always a temptation when the target is as big and juicy as Ryan is.
So Democrats will have to be smart. They should show respect for Ryan for being a serious guy, but then just explain to people, urgently but not over-heatedly, what he’s proposed. It’s just very hard to imagine that middle-of-the-road voters want harsh future cuts to Medicare, massive tax cuts for the rich, and huge reductions to domestic programs that most swing voters really don’t hate. Does this choice work in Florida, with all those old people? If Romney just sacrificed Florida, he’s lost the election already.
And why? To placate a party that doesn’t even want him as its nominee anyway. It’s psycho-weird. But at least it will carry the benefit, if this ticket loses, of keeping conservatives from griping that they lost because their ticket was too moderate. Conservatism will share—will own—this loss.
Is all that “daring”? Well, Thelma and Louise were “daring” too, but they ended up at the bottom of a canyon. If the Democrats handle this situation properly, that’s where this ticket will end up too, and then the rest of us—the people who don’t want federal policy to be based on Atlas Shrugged—can finally and fully press the case to the right that America is not behind you, and please grow up.
Paul Ryan is a bold and risky pick for vice president by Mitt Romney.
Forget all the talk about the risk-averse Mitt Romney and his policy-free campaign. Romney just embraced a man whose deficit reduction plans are impressively specific — and controversial. This is what a game-changer looks like post-Sarah Palin.
Unlike many of his fellow Republican congressmen, Paul Ryan has not been content to just demagogue the deficit and debt. He’s had the courage to put specific plans on paper that would actually deal with the problem. And Mitt Romney now owns those plans, for better or for worse. It may be the first time in American history where a nominee has outsourced policy to his VP candidate….
……This ticket will invigorate the Romney campaign among the base in terms of both style and substance. The Romney-Ryan ticket represents generational change — Paul Ryan, born in 1970, is the first pure member of Generation X to be on a national ticket. It is also the first presidential team to not have a Protestant on the ticket — Romney, of course, is Mormon and Ryan is Catholic. It is another small sign of how our country continues to evolve.
Democrats are said to be “salivating” over this pick because it allows them to draft sharp contrasts on politically popular programs like Medicare and Social Security. They believe that as the VP nominee, Paul Ryan makes this election a clear choice, rather than a referendum on President Obama. This is the framing of the election they have long wanted.
But Romney’s surprising pick of Paul Ryan shows seriousness about governing and adds policy depth to his campaign. As a sign of the kind of president Mitt Romney might be, it is impressive and confident. And hopefully it will represent a decisive shift in this presidential election — away from “attack and distract” and towards seriousness and substance.
The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman (added in a later version of this post):
So much for the meme that the 2012 presidential campaign was just a content-free snarkfest of attack ads about secret offshore tax havens and failed Obama promises.
By choosing Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, Mitt Romney assures that the election contest will be in public what it already was beneath the surface: a referendum on the centrality of government social-service programs to the real lives of average Americans.
For the first time since Ronald Reagan, the (now) Tea Party-infused Republican Party is running as a full-throated foe of what the Democrats — usually with bipartisan votes — built over three-quarters of a century: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, federal education spending and tax credits designed to support and enhance middle-class life.
In one of the more memorable and significant Freudian slips, Romney introduced Ryan in Norfolk, Va., on Saturday morning by calling him “the next president.” And in terms of ideological purity and drive, it’s true. If this ticket wins, Ryan and his Randian, libertarian, anti-federal philosophy will be the beating heart of the Romney administration — despite the Romney campaign’s immediate effort to distance itself from the Ryan budget…
….In part because of Ryan’s budget — endorsed by the GOP in the House and, in general terms, by Romney — and in part because of hard times in the economy, the president’s campaign long ago became, at its core, a defense of the Social State as we know it.
In a tough economic climate, he says, the last thing we can afford to do is dismantle the existing machinery of defined-benefit guarantees in Social Security, Medicare and other programs.
Ryan, and now Romney, are now saying just the opposite: that in tough times we can’t afford not to dismantle that machinery, so taxes can be kept low or cut further.
That’s the essence of what the election is about. It always was. Now it’s out in the open. The functional question is: Which party will have the mandate — and control of Congress — to decide the final outcome of the debate?
Democratic strategist Paul Begala thinks Romney has gone nuclear:
In selecting Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has doubled-down on the one thing he has never flip-flopped on: economic elitism. Romney, born to wealth, has selected Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, who was also born to wealth. As the former University of Oklahoma football coach, Barry Switzer, once said of someone else: both these guys were born on third and thought they hit a triple.
In selecting Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has doubled-down on the one thing he has never flip-flopped on: economic elitism. Romney, born to wealth, has selected Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, who was also born to wealth. As the former University of Oklahoma football coach, Barry Switzer, once said of someone else: both these guys were born on third and thought they hit a triple.
…..In selecting Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney has doubled-down on the one thing he has never flip-flopped on: economic elitism. Romney, born to wealth, has selected Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, who was also born to wealth. As the former University of Oklahoma football coach, Barry Switzer, once said of someone else: both these guys were born on third and thought they hit a triple.
Ryan has solid policy credentials, but also has enough media presence and charm to make people listen. Team Obama will hang Ryan’s budget on Romney, but they were going to do that anyway. Why not have the man himself as the VP to explain it? Ryan also gives the ticket solid Washington experience, while giving conservatives more hope that a Romney presidency will aim for serious change.
That would be the biggest plus for the campaign, which has had to fight Obama’s strategy of distraction. Ryan’s efforts play the long game on budgets and entitlement reform; he’s one of the few people in Washington talking about not just the fiscal cliff but the long-term fiscal gap I wrote about this week in the Fiscal Times. Progressives dislike the plan, conservatives fault it for taking too long to balance the budget, but Ryan’s plan is literally the only serious plan on the table to fix that $222 trillion long-term gap. Ryan adds instant gravitas to the campaign, something that Obama and his team have failed to do despite being the incumbent President of the United States.
When a prudent candidate like Mitt Romney picks someone like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama. The theme that Mr. Romney’s campaign has emphasized for months and months — that the president has failed as an economic leader — may have persuaded 47 or 48 or 49 percent of voters to vote for him, he seems to have concluded. But not 50.1 percent of them, and not enough for Mr. Romney to secure 270 electoral votes.
That reading may be correct. National polls tell different stories about the state of the race — but most have Mr. Obama ahead. Polls of swing states have been a bit more consistent. In states like Ohio, Mr. Obama’s lead has been small — but it has been steady and stubborn.
…Young, attractive and outspoken, Mr. Ryan will be beloved by conservatives — – and just as assuredly, detested by liberals. In a race that lacks compelling story lines and fresh faces, he may become the focal point. It seems entirely plausible that his rallies will draw larger crowds than either of the presidential candidates themselves, and that stories about him will draw more Internet traffic, especially in the early days of his candidacy. He should also be a fund-raising magnet — – for Mr. Romney, and probably also for Mr. Obama.
Mr. Ryan’s controversial budget, which polls poorly, will obviously get much more attention than it had previously. The fate of the presidential race and the fate of Congressional races may become more closely tied together. Mr. Obama will no longer have to stretch to evoke the specter of Congress and its 15 percent approval rating. With Mr. Ryan on the opposing ticket, he will be running against a flesh-and-blood embodiment of it.
Taking risks like these is not what you do if you think you have a winning hand already. But Mr. Romney, the turnaround artist, decided that he needed to turn around his own campaign.
It’s going to take some time before we can reliably measure the impact of Mr. Romney’s choice. Vice-presidential picks sometimes produce “bounces” in the polls, especially when they are as newsworthy as this one, but they often fade after a few days or a few weeks. And the party conventions, which almost always produce polling bounces, are coming up soon.
I think there are other “bold” picks that Mr. Romney could have made — Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, for instance, or Govs. Chris Christie of New Jersey or Brian Sandoval of Nevada — where the balance of risk and reward would have been a little better. Some of these candidates, especially Mr. Rubio and Mr. Christie, would also have excited the Republican base. But they might also have had a more natural appeal to independent voters, and to demographic groups that Mr. Romney is struggling to win over….
…But at least Mr. Romney is taking a risk, something his cautious campaign had not been doing much of previously.
The National Journal’s Major Garrett on the reaction from Camp Obama:
Whether it’s true or not, senior advisers to President Obama’s re-election campaign believed, long before presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney picked Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, that Romney had been oddly and helpfully “collaborative” in making the Obama case against him.
That’s the word David Axelrod used in an interview with National Journal to describe Romney’s unwillingness to pitch a strong national narrative about his life, his plans for the nation or how he understood the economic travails of the middle class. Axelrod found Romney’s dug-in refusal to release more tax returns (only 2010 so far, with 2011 coming) similarly helpful. Axelrod even thought Romney’s overseas trip helped Obama reinforce a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time meme.
From team Obama’s perspective, the Ryan choice transforms this imagined and perceived collaboration into a virtual partnership.
“It plays right into it,” a senior Obama strategist told National Journal. “Romney believes in cutting taxes for the wealthy and making the middle class pay for them. Ryan not only believes it, but he’s actually done it. It’s Romney’s agenda in action.”
Obama aides had been convinced that Romney would settle on former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Again, fevered perceptions of rival campaign weaknesses are just that. But they now believe Romney has used his biggest choice of the campaign to drive home their central indictment of his candidacy and his policies — that they pose a threat to middle-class livelihoods and aspirations.
One Obama backer privately said — not the least bit in jest — that the campaign could now siphon off cash donations for margarita machines, because there was so much to celebrate between now and Election Day.
Another Democratic operative declared the election effectively over — that Ryan was the self-hammered nail in Romney’s own coffin.
“They chose a candidate who is 42, but looks 22, and is a professional Washington politician,” said Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis, a top adviser to John Edwards’ 2008 campaign and former chief of staff to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. “He helps Romney with not a single state, not a single demographic and he won’t turn a single undecided vote around. He also destroys Romney’s argument that professional Washington insiders and politicians aren’t qualified to govern. He’s a disastrous pick that proves the Romney and Republicans are stuck in some kind of time capsule where they think they can win elections by debating obscure conservative theory.”
32m Larry Sabato ?@LarrySabato
All Ryan, all the time. Watching Romney-Ryan today, they seem to enjoy campaigning, & mesh well as a ticket.4h Larry Sabato ?@LarrySabato
@MattDurrant_ Romney not shoring up conservative base–they won’t vote for Obama–but rather enthusing them by picking Ryan.7h Larry Sabato ?@LarrySabato
Traditional role of VP nominee: Attack dog. How Ryan attacks Obama may be different. We’ll see.7h Larry Sabato ?@LarrySabato
Kennedyesque young family, JFK-like energy & vigor. Catholic, too.Oh God, Stewart & Colbert just got their opening segment. “I’ve been known to make a mistake”–as Mitt hugs Ryan.
7h Larry Sabato ?@LarrySabato
Most interesting thing I’ve heard today: Romney made choice Aug. 1. Secret survived 10 days. Impressive.Favorite R adjective for Ryan: BOLD. Favorite D adjective: RISKY. The battle to define begins.
Some Tweets from another superb analyst, columnist Dick Polman:
5h Dick Polman ?@DickPolman1
Romney wanted a referendum on Obama – didn’t work. Now he’s rolling dice with Ryan & embracing his baggage. My blog http://shar.es/vITvo
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6h Dick Polman ?@DickPolman1
Great factoid from C-Span’s Steve Scully: Ryan is the first House member to be tapped as running mate since William Miller in 1964.6h Dick Polman ?@DickPolman1
“We have the largest deficit…since World War II” – says the guy who voted in the early ’00s for every major budget-busting Bush bill.6h Dick Polman ?@DickPolman1
The rattling you just heard was the cart of Champagne being wheeled into Obama campaign headquarters.6h Dick Polman ?@DickPolman1
This is the most scintillating GOP pick since Bob Dole chose Jack Kemp in ’96 to shore up his tenuous ties to the conservative base.7h Dick Polman ?@DickPolman1
This is definitely the Good Hair ticket.
The National Journal’s Beth Reinhard:
For Mitt Romney, choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate completes his evolution from centrist governor of a famously liberal state to standard bearer of an increasingly conservative Republican Party.
On abortion, gay rights, immigration and climate change and other issues, Romney at one time aligned himself with moderates, only to swing back to the right when the politics of the moment demanded it. On one key issue, he led not only his party but the nation – bringing universal healthcare to Massachusetts as governor — only to downplay his singular achievement when Republicans turned against President Obama’s comparable law.
The final step in Romney’s progression came over the last year. As he struggled to overcome resistance to his second White House bid from the conservative movement, he let down his guard against Ryan’s dramatic proposal to overhaul the federal budget and curb entitlement spending.
Ironically, it was Romney’s former rival, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who last year invoked Ronald Reagan’s call to govern in “bold colors, not pale pastels’’ when he defended his criticism of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.’’ Romney savaged Perry’s rhetoric as too extreme and pitched himself as a steady steward of the trust fund. But now it is Romney who is embracing the GOP’s most audacious hues, partnering with the congressman determined to remake the nation’s safety net for the elderly and the poor.
While candidates typically lurch toward the mainstream during the general election, Romney is leaping toward the conservative wing of his party four months after he locked down the nomination. Now it is up to Romney to coax the rest of the electorate to follow his direction. Now it is up to him to lead.
Romney’s probably gotten the right wing of his party off his back for the duration; the primaries have finally ended for him. I would not under-estimate the value of that phenomenon. The question is whether that will come close to offsetting the weight of Ryan’s baggage.
I noticed that Romney tried to inoculate himself on the Medicare charge by alleging that Obama cut Medicare by $700 billion. That’s an old stupid lie, but it telegraphs where The Stupid is going.
Buckle your chinstraps, we are going to be engaging a frenzy of misinformation.
Overall, I am sure that the White House is doing cartwheels this morning. But, they shouldn’t forget, Romney is going to be feeding the American people lies through a billionaire-funded firehose.
Paul Ryan is probably pretty close to the worst choice Romney could have made. But he’s a very sincere-looking liar.
In a way, Paul Ryan is exactly whom President Barack Obama wanted on the Republican ticket with Mitt Romney. By selecting the Republican congressman from Wisconsin, whose name is synonymous with the GOP’s cut-taxes-for-the-rich and slash-programs-for-the-middle-class-and-the-poor, Romney has helped Obama in his No. 1 mission: shape the election not as a referendum on the sluggish economy but as a sharp clash between opposing sets of values and programs for the future.
Ever since the Democrats’ clock was cleaned by the tea party-ized Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama has pursued a grand political strategy of setting up his reelection contest as a choice between archly different visions. Long before Romney had vanquished the midgets of the GOP pack, Obama began using the Ryan budget proposal as his chief foil. In April 2011, he gave a speech at George Washington University that was a tongue-lashing of the Ryan’s budget plan, which would end Medicare as a guaranteed benefit and throw more tax breaks at the well-to-do than George W. Bush could imagine. Ryan, who attended the speech, was insulted and immediately blasted the president….
…..The pick may grant Romney a moment of boldness. Ryan is white guy, but not a boring white guy with no message. He is a wonky evangelist of far-right economic policy. But this move will give Obama another line of attack on Romney—an assault that will consume plenty of political oxygen. Instead of talking about the economy, does Romney want to discuss the details of Ryan’s plan? Apparently, yes.
More important, this choice shows that Romney, the onetime moderate GOP governor of a blue state, is marching in lockstep with the tea party parade and has not only accepted but embraced his party’s lurch to the far end of the ideological spectrum. This is precisely the sort of behavior that Obama yearned for on the part of the Republicans.
The conventional wisdom is that veep candidates don’t matter. That’s largely true (with Sarah Palin perhaps a notable exception). Yet Romney’s tapping of Ryan—for what the Romney campaign calls “America’s Comeback Team”—provides the president the opportunity to bolster his different-vision message. Chicago cannot be unhappy about that.
Governor Romney has made an inspired choice. Paul Ryan will make an excellent running mate and, if elected, vice president. What is most gratifying about the decision is, however, what it says about Romney himself.
Romney could have decided to run a vague and vacuous campaign based on the idea that the public would default to the out party in a bad economy. By selecting Ryan, he has ensured that the campaign will instead to a significant degree be about a conservative governing agenda.
Conservatives, and not just the Romney campaign and the Republican apparatus, will have to stand ready to fight back against the distortions that are sure to come — indeed, have already begun. Democrats will say that Romney-Ryan is a ticket committed to “dismantling” Medicare (by ensuring its solvency); that it would leave the poor to fend for themselves (by extending the successful principles of welfare reform); that their only interest is to comfort the rich (whose tax breaks they wish to pare back). These are debates worth winning, and they can be won.
The first question any vice-presidential pick must answer is whether he is ready to become president should disaster strike. Fiscal disaster is striking. A mark of statesmanship is to face mathematical reality and make hard choices in its light. Romney has chosen a running mate who is more presidential than the incumbent.
Robbing from the poor to give to the rich. That about sums them up.
I’ve refrained from posting on US politics because it is simply too depressing. Watching nutty conservatives transform the once sane if misguided Republican Party into an Ayn Rand-worshipping club of ueber-rich white men — and seeing so many Americans get on board donning their Tea Part costumes — has been a jaw-dropping spectacle. Watching all the newly minted young Tea Party Republicans oust their moderate opponents two years ago was an ominous sign of the country’s dangerous veering to the right.
Paul Ryan will undoubtedly enjoy his honeymoon, just as Sarah Palin did. But I see him as a huge red target on Romney’s back. Willard Romney’s campaign has been all about hiding what he would do to restore America’s economy. He has been intentionally vague and weasely, always changing the subject to how bad Obama is. Now he has a plan and a vision, he is joined at the hip with it, the shameless Ryan budget that offers huge tax cuts for the very richest Americans while slashing benefits the middle and lower classes have come to depend on. Now Romney has to defend this program and convince those who will be hurt by it the most to see it as the Holy Grail. Democrats should probably be rejoicing, but as H.L. Mencken once famously said, “No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” Maybe they’ll be sucked in by the whacky argument that Ryan’s budget plan is “courageous” and “serious.”
Now, one would think that after the McCain campaign’s ultimately disastrous experience with Palin Team Romney would’ve been wary of picking a VP candidate whose (relative) dynamism & popularity could overshadow a tepid, underwhelming top of the ticket. Conversely, how much power will Ryan have to push his austerity-on-steroids legislative agenda if he is in a relatively powerless position in a Romney cabinet?
Outside the Beltway’s James Joyner:
Still, while my instant reaction is much more positive than it was four years ago, I don’t yet understand the logic of this pick.
First, Ryan probably doesn’t help give Romney a major swing state. He’s never run state-wide in Wisconsin and it’s likely that the state will go to the Democrats no matter what.
Second, he’s a mere Representative. Outside of the sort of political junkies who read political blogs, few people have heard of him. Nor does he carry the gravitas that comes with a governorship or even the Senate.
Third, he doesn’t shore up any major weakness of Romney’s.
On paper, at least, I’d have preferred a Rob Portman—who also doubles down on Romney’s fiscal strength but brings foreign policy experience from his tenure as US Trade Representative. Or, if he thought a “bold choice” was necessary, he could have gone with Chris Christie (assuming he was willing), who would have been an effective attack dog on the stump.
The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohen:
Many millions of working-age Americans would lose health insurance. Senior citizens would anguish over whether to pay their rent or their medical bills, in a way they haven’t since the 1960s. Government would be so starved of resources that, by 2050, it wouldn’t have enough money for core functions like food inspections and highway maintenance. And the richest Americans would get a huge tax cut.
This is the America that Paul Ryan envisions. And now we know that it is the America Mitt Romney envisions.
Romney is trying to distance himself from the only quote substantive unquote reason he picked Ryan, namely his crackpot plan for a budget. This is a lame attempt to claim that attacks on the Ryan Plan are obsolete. No one doubts that any budget Romney releases will be filled with tax breaks for Romney and his pals and contain numerous stealth projects to gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. (The repeal of Obamacare won’t be stealth). You can also expect massive giveaways to the military and to churches – a lot to the churches. In short it will be the Ryan budget – mittitfied.
Some Tweets by satirist Andy Borowitz:
Andy Borowitz ?@BorowitzReport
When Romney and Ryan call themselves “America’s Comeback Team,” they mean they want America to come back to 1860. #RomneyRyan201237m Andy Borowitz ?@BorowitzReport
Ryan: I Would Replace Social Security with Groupons #RomneyRyan2012(RETWEET)43m KimJongNumberUn ?@KimJongNumberUn
I remember Dad used to say, “I know people think I’m crazy and all, but I’m no Paul Ryan.”
Retweeted by Andy Borowitz1h Andy Borowitz ?@BorowitzReport
Paul Ryan being sworn in as President would be a great last scene in a Planet of the Apes remake. #RomneyRyan20122h Andy Borowitz ?@BorowitzReport
Ryan: Trillions Could Be Cut from Budget if We Eliminate Empathy #RomneyRyan2012
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2h Andy Borowitz ?@BorowitzReport
BREAKING: Ryan Proposes Cutting Three of Four Food Groups #RomneyRyan2012e
2h Andy Borowitz ?@BorowitzReport
Romney: “It’s time to transform America, and Paul Ryan and I are both Transformers”: http://bit.ly/NUw2En3h Andy Borowitz ?@BorowitzReport
MUST READ: Less Interesting Person Than Romney Found in Wisconsin: http://bit.ly/NUw2En13h KimJongNumberUn ?@KimJongNumberUn
Paul Ryan wants to cut food for poor people. That American bastard totally stole that idea from Dad.
UPDATE: Some more reaction. Here’s another cross section of various viewpoints:
—Game Change co-author John Heilemann cites polls indicating that if voters find out more about the Ryan budget they are not happy — and that is one reason why Chicago is gleeful:
So this was not a safe or conventional pick — not a pick motivated by winning a state (as Portman would have partly been regarding Ohio or Marco Rubio would have partly been regarding Florida). This was a pick about ideas, about policies, about core convictions. But it was also a pick driven by political weakness. All along, Team Romney’s bedrock strategy has been to make the 2012 election a clean referendum on Obama’s economic management and leadership, an election about unemployment, growth, and wages. In elevating Ryan, what Team Romney has done is execute a sharp U-turn, embracing the theory that 2012 will not be a pure referendum but a choice election, and one in which the two sides’ contrasting approaches to the deficit, debt, entitlements, and taxes will take center stage. And while this is surely not a Hail Mary pass on the order of John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin, it is almost as much, as some Romneyites admit, an attempt to (pardon the expression) change the game.
All of which helps explain why the Obamans are grinning madly. It’s not simply that they, too, see the pick as an admission by Team Romney that its strategy was failing. Or that Ryan doesn’t clearly pass the test of being (and, crucially, looking) ready to be president. Or that his utter lack of private-sector bona fides undercuts, however mildly, Romney’s attacks on Obama for lacking same. It’s that Chicago and the White House perceive this as a broader capitulation regarding the core dynamic of the race: an acceptance of the “choice election” framing, which is exactly the frame that the incumbent and his people have embraced and attempted to propagate from the start.
And just why have they done that? Because they knew full well that if the race were purely a referendum on Obama, they would likely lose — but if bright lines could be drawn on values and visions regarding fiscal choices, that was the kind of election they could win. This was why Chicago was planning to hang the Ryan budget around Romney’s neck regardless of whether the congressman was on the ticket or not. Obama’s data jockeys have been polling and focus-grouping on this for months, and they are over the moon about what they have found. And while that data is guarded by lock, key, and Uzi-toting thugs (kidding — sorta), anyone interested in the topic should take a look at the work that Stan Greenberg and his team at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner did recently on the Ryan agenda and its electoral implications for Democracy Corps. To put it mildly, their conclusion is fairly bracing..
Go to the link to read the poll. He ends with this:
No more hide-and-seek. No more guessing games. No more theorizing about what President Willard would do if he found himself behind the biggest desk of all. With Romney and Ryan now joined at the hip, the choice and the stakes of 2012 are as clear as day. As a man with no knack for memorable phrases once memorably said: Bring ’em on.
A wonderful thing has happened for this country. Paul Ryan will be the Republican nominee for vice president.
Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn’t just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals. My liberal friends point out that Ryan’s plan leaves many details unclear. That’s true. But show me another Republican who has addressed the nation’s fiscal problems as candidly and precisely as Ryan has. He’s got the least detailed budget proposal out there, except for all the others.
Ryan refutes the Democratic Party’s bogus arguments. He knows that our domestic spending trajectory is unsustainable and that liberals who fail to get it under control are leading their constituents over a cliff, just like in Europe. Eventually, you can’t borrow enough money to make good on your promises, and everyone’s screwed. Ryan understands that the longer we ignore the debt crisis and postpone serious budget cuts—the liberal equivalent of denying global warming—the more painful the reckoning will be. There’s nothing compassionate about that kind of irresponsibility.
….It speaks enormously well for Romney that he made this choice. It tells me he’d run the country the same way he ran Massachusetts: as a prudent, numbers-oriented businessman.
Ryan may not help Romney win this election. For the reasons given above, he may actually hurt the ticket. And there’s a good argument to be made—which Democrats surely will make—that Ryan’s emphasis on austerity is a bad fit for a weak economy. But Ryan’s ideas are important for the future. As the recovery proceeds, we’ll move out of a context in which stimulus made sense, and toward a context in which reining in deficits and debt becomes more essential. We’ll need more attention to those traditional Republican principles. We’ll need more voters, especially young voters, who value those principles. We’ll need a generation that thinks like Paul Ryan.
The party of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, the party of spite and bloviating and recklessness and extremism, isn’t for me. I’m voting for Obama. But four years from now? In a stronger economy, with a runaway debt? And Ryan at the top of the ticket? That’s awfully tempting.
Balloon Juice’s Freddie deBoer:
In American national politics, it doesn’t get much more extreme than Paul Ryan, or the Ryan-Romney budget. That’s reality. Mitt Romney taking on Ryan as his running mate is like Barack Obama taking on Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich. The Ryan-Romney budget is one of the most extreme policy proposals in the history of our country, as extreme as the PATRIOT act or the Alien and Sedition acts—wartime legislation that drew on national panic. Romney’s purported strength is that he’s a moderate technocrat, a can-do businessman who will use his fiscal prudence and New England moderation to help get our national house in order without, you know, letting New Orleans get swallowed by the sea or accidentally invading Turks and Caicos. This is, of course, bullshit; Romney is neither a moderate nor a technocrat nor a fiscal conservative nor a particularly skillful executive. The Ryan nomination is merely the coup de grace, the last confirmation that Romney is an extremist beholden to a mad, extremist wing of a mad, extremist party. This is not business as usual; this is arch-conservatism by any measure.
The question is whether our media will tell the truth about this extremism. If Obama was actually to nominate Sanders or Kucinich, our political media would report on it as if the President had personally sodomized Lady Liberty while reciting The Communist Manifesto and paying children to go gay. Romney’s nomination of the even-more-extreme Paul Ryan has mostly been met with observations about Ryan’s good looks and his supposed seriousness and “wonkiness.” In the war for the Presidency of 2012, one of the key battles will be over this issue exactly: will our comprehensive failure of a new media tell the truth about the extremism of Romney, Ryan, and the Ryan-Romney budget? Will those of us opposed to Republican extremism be able to call a spade a spade and spread the word about the Romney ticket’s ultra-conservative policies?
…Do you want to know why Tea Party America loves Paul Ryan, why he is the guy for the Republican base? Precisely because he is not a compromiser, precisely because he is an ugly, grasping extremist. You don’t get to be a bugle boy in the Republican army unless you’re on the lunatic conservative fringe, and this man was just given his stars as a general. Read what the conservative blogs say about him. They love him because he WON’T compromise, because he is thoroughly, enthusiastically ready to destroy this country and imperil its elderly, its children, its disabled, its poor, and its students in the name of his insane ideology. To call this man “open to criticism and amenable to compromise” is a statement of… such jaw-dropping, incomprehensible dishonesty, it makes me blush.
This is, truly, the stupidity that surpasses all understanding. Will Saletan has glanced around the political party and, spying a cute boy in the corner, projected all of his teenaged fantasies onto him, reality be damned. August is not yet two weeks old. Yet I will read no stupider piece, no grander statement of delusion and deceit, in the entirety of the 2012 Presidential election. Congratulations, Saletan; you’ve finally impressed me.
Red State’s Eric Erickson, who is also an analyst on CNN has a post that needs to be read in its entirety. Here’s just a small part of it — a few excerpts:
…This election is trending away from Romney as the economy deteriorates and more Americans believe the economy is getting worse. That should be a red flag for the GOP…
During the month of June, Barack Obama had a terrible month. Since then, he has continued to make some serious flubs. But through it all, Team Romney has really failed to capitalize on those stumbles and Romney has had a bad month himself. His message has not broken.He tried an international trip and timed it during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. It got little attention except for his own missteps.
Today, he announced a very bold pick in Paul Ryan. This forces the message to be about the economy and our long term future. It is a fight worth having and one we can win. But I am less and less confident that Team Romney, as presently constituted, can win that fight…
…Today, the Romney camp sent out a talking points sheet claiming that while picking Paul Ryan, Romney had his own budget plans. This is delusional and not credible spin. You pick Paul Ryan, you defend his budget. It is that simple. That one bullet point sums up a summer of dysfunction. The Romney team seems to be believing its own spin, which can often lead to disaster.
Team Romney-Ryan has the chance for a real reboot. But it is one they need to take it. While I am not yet worried, I am concerned by the consistent propensity of Team Romney to not capitalize on Barack Obama’s missteps and to trip over their own feet when they get ahead.
Paul Ryan is not enough. Mitt Romney does need to prune and fertilizer his campaign team.
Leave it to Willard Romney, international man of principle, to get himself bullied into being bold and independent.
Make no mistake. In his decision to make Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, his running mate, Romney finally surrendered the tattered remnants of his soul not only to the extreme base of his party, but also to extremist economic policies, and to an extremist view of the country he seeks to lead. This is unimaginable to those of us who lived here under Romney’s barely perceptible stewardship of the Commonwealth (God save it!). If he’d even hinted that he agreed with a fraction of a smidgen of a portion of the policies on which Ryan has built his career, Romney would have been hanging from the Sacred Cod by the middle of 2005. And it’s hard not to notice that the way the decision got leaked — in the dead of a Friday night, with the Olympics still going on, after two weeks in which Romney and his campaign had demonstrated all the political skills of a handball — fairly dripped with flopsweat.
(And how’d you like to be poor Tim Pawlenty, being told by Tagg Romney that he’ll be riding in the roof carrier to Iowa again, with nothing in his future except, maybe, a couple of bucks at Christmas.)
Which is not to say this isn’t a shrewd move. In one great swoop, Willard has recaptured a good portion of the elite political media, which has been crushing on Ryan’s “courage” to take on the “tough choices” — none of which, it should be pointed out, likely will affect Ryan, who’s already got himself an education out of the social safety net he now intends to shred, and certainly will never affect the haircut at the top of the ticket, or his great-grandchildren, for all that — and the coverage of the pick in the middle of the night showed that many of our finer chattering heads are already practicing tying the stem of the cherry with their tongues in preparation for covering the new Republican ticket. On CNN, at about 1:35 this morning, Wolf Blitzer was already warning Democrats not to get too cocky in the face of Paul Ryan’s mighty intellect. “In 1980,” Wolf told us, “Democrats were high-fiving when the Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan.”
AND:
Paul Ryan is an authentically dangerous zealot. He does not want to reform entitlements. He wants to eliminate them. He wants to eliminate them because he doesn’t believe they are a legitimate function of government. He is a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of dystopias in which he never will have to live. This now is an argument not over what kind of political commonwealth we will have, but rather whether or not we will have one at all, because Paul Ryan does not believe in the most primary institution of that commonwealth: our government. The first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution make a lie out of every speech he’s ever given. He looks at the country and sees its government as something alien that is holding down the individual entrepreneurial genius of 200 million people, and not as their creation, and the vehicle through which that genius can be channelled for the general welfare.
Ross Douthat looks at the possible reasons Romney picked Ryan and adds this:
None of these three points, however, change my basic skepticism about the pick. This is a game-changer, of a sort: Romney has been running a cautious, content-free campaign, and picking Ryan will effectively force him to become much more substantive on policy, while giving the country the clearest possible choice heading into November. But setting up a clash of worldviews doesn’t address Romney’s most glaring policy weakness, which is the (understandable) fear among hard-strapped voters that Republican policies will benefit the rich more than the middle class. Ryan’s association with entitlement reform is at best orthogonal to that weakness, and at worst it exacerbates it substantially. What’s more, by picking him Romney may have passed up a golden opportunity to take advantage of the Obama campaign’s leftward tack over the last year: Instead of making a sustained play for the center of the country, he’s chosen to raise the ideological stakes.
This will make the race more exciting and more serious, and I’m looking forward to watching it play out. But I don’t think it’s made a Romney victory more likely.
The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber thinks Romney picked Ryan to blame a loss on conservatives. The key part of his post:
There are two ways to think about Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan this morning. The first is how it affects Romney’s prospects for winning in November. The second is how it affects the internal struggle between conservatives and moderates within the GOP…
….So, to review, the key recent development is that Romney is poised to lose a race he should by all rights be winning, and conservatives are poised to blame this loss on his ideological moderation. (He not only gave people health care, he wants credit for it!). Against this backdrop, the rationale for the Ryan pick strikes me as pretty clear: Ryan is the way Romney and his aides escape blame for their now-likely defeat—blame which would have vicious and unrelenting—and pin it in on conservatives instead. With only minor historical revisions, they will be able to tell a story about how Romney was keeping the race close through early August, at which point the party’s conservative darling joined the ticket and sent the poll numbers into steady decline.
According to this narrative, the campaign will merely be guilty of a political misdemeanor—being bullied by conservatives into a lousy running mate—not the felony of strategically miscalculating against a historically weak incumbent (which is where the existing storyline was headed). That’s a plea bargain any right-minded politico would take, even if they didn’t consciously consider it in those terms. Moreover, there’s a whiff of Pascal’s Wager to the whole gambit: God (in this case, political salvation through ideological extremism) may not exist. But you don’t lose anything by pretending he does. And, who knows, he may surprise you!
Better still, this won’t just be good for Romney’s historical reputation, and for the future career prospects of his campaign team. It will be good for the entire GOP. Pre-Ryan, a Romney loss would have led to the nomination of a Neanderthal in 2016—someone, like Rick Santorum, who could say he warned the party against a candidate too moderate to take on Obama. Post-Ryan, a Romney loss will be read as a Goldwater-esque act of ideological self-immolation, which the party must resist at all costs if it hopes to win another election. Paradoxically, the Ryan pick is both selfish and selfless at the same time.
What it isn’t, as all the commentators keep insisting, is “bold.” It’s a highly risk-averse move—one that assumes a loss and tries to make the best of it. In that respect, Romney is staying true to himself till the bitter end.
Buzzfeed has more on the Obama’ team’s reaction:
For the most part, the Obama camp abandoned their attempts to make Romney seem like a radical. They found more success in describing the Republican candidate as an out of touch, super-rich corporate felon with bank accounts in the Caymans and tax loopholes wider than gaps in the O-Zone.
But the choice of Paul Ryan makes the R-word once again chic, and Chicago is now going to combine the narratives they’ve set for their rivals–to, in essence, run against the rich guy and the radical.
Since the Ryan news broke, the Obama team’s response has been one that borders on glee. (Or sleep deprived excitement.) Privately, campaign officials started a pre-emptive victory lap: calling the Ryan choice crazy; viewing “end of the Medicare as we know it” as a gift from the Gods; observing that neither man had foreign policy or military experience, a first for a Republican ticket. And that Ryan was not only radical, but green.
“The guy is pretty smart,” one Obama official told BuzzFeed. “But should be way out of his league at this water depth.”Added this official: “To be clear, I think it’s insane.”
And Rupert Murdoch is VERY happy.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.