If there’s one thing left and right, Democratic and Republican, many centrists and independent pundits, political pros and analysts agree on it’s this: you can dispute over the specifics about how it has changed the campaign, you can dispute over the degree of how it has changed it, but Republican Mitt Romney’s decision to tap Rep. Paul Ryan as his Vice Presidential running mater has changed the campaign.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza offers five key areas in which the pick alters the race:
1. Ryan has energized Republicans. Read any report out of the Ryan-Romney bus tour through Virginia (Saturday) and North Carolina (Sunday), and it’s clear that there is an energy in the crowds that wasn’t there a few days ago. The question is how long that positive buzz will last. Remember that then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin drew huge crowds during her first few days (and weeks) as Sen. John McCain’s running mate in 2008. And we know how that worked out. For the moment, the fresh face and Midwestern aw-shucks mentality that Ryan exudes seem to have Republicans excited about their presidential ticket anew — or for the first time.
2. Romney and Ryan have chemistry. Romney’s default mode is reserved — no matter the circumstances or the stakes. That’s why it has been striking to watch him interact with Ryan. …
3. Romney won’t run on the Ryan budget plan — and Democrats won’t let him get away with that…
4. Republicans thinks Ryan can reach independents…
5. Putting Ryan on the ticket makes the choice in November even clearer. The differences between where Romney wants to take the country and where Obama has guided it over the past four years were already relatively clear to anyone even sort of paying attention. But, in choosing the face of the Republican vision for governance — deep changes to the social safety net, an emphasis on importance of the private sector — Romney is ensuring that the lines of demarcation between the Democratic and Republican tickets are as stark as they have been in modern memory….
Go to the link to read it all.
The New Yorker’s John Cassidy:
Maybe Romney can mount a more effective campaign on this terrain of clashing ideologies. At the very least, it will energize Republican activists, many of whom view Ryan as a budding philosopher king—a Newt Gingrich without the arrogance or the girlfriends….
Another upside of picking Ryan, from Romney’s perspective, is that it will shift some of the attention away from him. Whether you love Ryan or hate him, he’s an interesting figure with provocative ideas, and he gets a lot of media ink. It may seem strange for a Presidential campaign to wish to divert attention from the Presidential candidate. In this case, though, things have come to that. With the media focussing so much on Romney’s taxes, his record at Bain Capital, and his gaffes, his campaign was listing badly.
Ryan’s selection changes the subject. That, at least, is what Stuart Stevens, Romney’s campaign manager, and spokesman Eric “Etch-a-Sketch” Fehrnstrom will be hoping for. So far, their effort to wipe out Romney’s record during the primaries and reset the campaign narrative along lines more favorable to him hasn’t been nearly as successful as they were hoping. Maybe throwing Ryan into the fray will help do the trick and transform the election into a debate about big government versus small government. That has to be the thinking in Boston. If the price is that his conservative ideas will turn off some moderate voters, it’s a price worth paying. These are desperate times.
Will the new strategy work? Even before Ryan and Romney had left the stage, the cable networks were dredging up details of his plans to reshape the retirement system. CNN asked Newt Gingrich whether he still considered it “right-wing social engineering.” There’s a lot more of that to come. Democrats like David Axelrod and Chuck Schumer like nothing more than scaremongering on Social Security and Medicare. And in this case, their scaremongering isn’t even scaremongering. The original Ryan budget plan did envisage getting rid of Medicare as it currently exists.
Straight after the Veep announcement, Romney’s campaign rushed out a set of talking points devoted to Ryan’s proposals. They said, “Gov. Romney applauds Paul Ryan for going in the right direction with his budget, and as president he will be putting together his own plan for cutting the deficit and putting the budget on a path to balance.”
Axelrod responded on Twitter: “Wow, Mittsters break land speak record trying to distance from radical Ryan budget. Problem: it looks just like Mitt’s.
According to several reports, Ryan is going to make a solo trip to Florida to try and pre-empt salivating Democrats, who feel he can cause the GOP to lose the state due to his positions on medicare and social security. The Politico reports:
Republicans are for the most part glad Romney sought to shake up the race by tapping Ryan. The hope, among Romney officials and Republicans not associated with the campaign, is that the 42-year-old, deer-hunting son of Janesville, Wisc., can give Romney a boost with young voters and his fellow Catholics in the Midwest.
“It doesn’t change the map, but it solidifies our prospects on the map we were already working under,” said Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director.
The election will still be decided in three regions where the campaign has been waged so far, in the Great Lakes, the transient South and the interior West. And Republicans now believe that they have a better shot at Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin.
But for Ryan to be an asset in any of those areas, he and the Romney campaign must preempt what is already becoming a ferocious assault on the congressman’s budget blueprint. One strategy Romney already seems to be taking is arguing that while Ryan’s budget is courageous and moves in the right direction, he would propose his own budget as president.
The biggest danger for Romney is in Florida, with its must-win 29 electoral votes and heavy senior population, Republicans said it was crucial to inoculate voters on Ryan’s “Roadmap,” part of which would turn Medicare into a voucher-based system for future retirees.
“The Ryan pick certainly energizes both sides and that means in Florida the Romney campaign will need to be very clear about [what his] budget reform means — and doesn’t mean — for seniors,” said Florida Agricultural Commissioner and former Ryan House colleague Adam Putnam. “Fortunately, nobody is better at explaining these issues than Paul.”
But if many conservatives now feel they have the dream Vice President of their choice and that they party can now offer what in the 1960s conservatives called “a choice, not an echo,” Democrats now feel Ryan gives them a chance to solidify their own message.
If Romney is betting that his selection of Ryan will rally his conservative base in a nip-and-tuck election, Democrats are counting on its having the same effect on their side. For months, the Obama campaign has been trying to tie Romney to Ryan’s Republican House budget proposal, which the president in April called “social Darwinism” that would pit the poor against the wealthy. Ryan has proposed major cuts to spending and entitlement programs in an effort to curb the spiraling national debt.
But Obama’s campaign believes Ryan’s ideological views will turn off moderate voters and drive liberals to the polls, especially in Florida, an important swing state where Obama, in two appearances last month, vilified the congressman’s proposal to partially privatize Medicare. In this way, Democrats say, Ryan provides a natural foil for the president, who has framed the election as a choice between sharply contrasting visions that could fundamentally reshape the nation.
At the fundraising event, one of five Obama attended in Chicago on Sunday, the president said of his rivals: “They all believe that if you get rid of more regulations for big corporations and give more tax breaks to the wealthy, it will lead to jobs and prosperity for everyone else. That’s what they’re proposing, where they’ll take us if they win. That’s not speculation; it’s on their Web site, in their budget that House Republicans voted for repeatedly.”
Responding to Obama’s remarks, Romney spokesman Ryan Williams charged the president with running a “fear and smear campaign because his policies have failed.”
With Ryan, considered a policy wunderkind inside the GOP, on the ticket, Williams said the Romney campaign will “continue to put forward idea after idea on how to grow the economy and get spending under control.”
Yet beneath the Obama reelection team’s forceful response to Ryan was a sense of delight at the campaign headquarters in Chicago, and among their Democratic allies, that they got the vice presidential candidate they wanted.
But there is that old saying: “Be careful what you wish for.”
However, it’s clear that Team Obama disagrees with GOPers over one point of their analysis: independent voters. Just look at how Obama framed the election at a fundraiser this weekend — perfectly tailed to the concerns of a key chunk of independent voters:
“They have tried to sell us this trickle-down fairy dust before, and guess what? It didn’t work,” Obama said, citing House Republican-passed budget plans Ryan authored that the president argued didn’t cut the deficit, create jobs or revive the middle class.
Obama noted Republican opposition to a host of his proposals that he said would help move the country forward, including his signature health care reform law and idea of allowing tax cuts enacted under PresidentGeorge W. Bush to expire on income above $250,000.
“It has to do with how do we create security for middle-class folks and how do we create ladders of opportunity for everybody,” the president said. “That’s how we’ve always grown this economy.”
While Romney has campaigned against Obama largely on the basis of an uncertain economic recovery and continued high joblessness, the president contended it’s partisanship in the nation’s capital that was keeping the country from moving forward.
“What’s holding us back is a brand of Washington politics that says we are not going to compromise no matter what,” Obama said. “It’s gridlock and stalemates and dysfunction, and it’s an idea propagated by the other side that somehow we’re going to grow this economy from the top down and that if people at the top are doing really, really well, then everyone else is automatically going to benefit.”
The National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein thinks Ryan’s selection could make Romney’s task harder:
R
yan is likely to bring energy and a propulsive sense of mission to a Romney campaign that has often seemed more about Power Points than passion. But Democrats believe that Romney’s elevation of the Ryan plan could allow them to cut into the big advantages that polls this year show Romney continuing to enjoy among both blue-collar and older whites.
“By putting Ryan on the ticket, the Ryan budget is their vision for the country,” said veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, who wrote a memo last Sunday urging his party to nationalize both the presidential and congressional campaigns around Ryan’s budget. “They think the biggest problem of government is the money being spent on universal programs that older white non-college and working class voters depend on to have a middle class retirement. All that to pay for breathtaking tax cuts for the wealthiest. These are anti-elitist voters who are going to want very little to do with their vision and these two men.”
Veteran GOP consultant David Carmen acknowledges that such attitudes could threaten the GOP’s solidifying dominance among downscale whites. But he says for Romney that is a risk worth taking to broaden the campaign debate beyond the more personal issues that have dominated the discussion so far…..
….Generally surveys find white women more resistant to changes in the safety net than white men (although the specific Congressional Connection Poll on Ryan’s plan didn’t show that pattern.) If Ryan’s plan remains a central focus through the fall, it would not be surprising if that debate widened the gender gap — potentially helping the Republican ticket with men most receptive to the sort of broad anti-government arguments Ryan unfurled in his announcement speech Saturday, but hurting it with white women…
Obama faces many barriers-cultural, ideological, and in some cases racial-with older and working-class white voters. And Republicans are sure to remind those same voters about the provisions in Obama’s health care that will slow the growth of Medicare spending by $500 billion and use the savings to help finance coverage for the uninsured.
But if Ryan’s dream of restructuring Medicare provides Democrats a beachhead for recapturing any meaningful number of voters like Illum-particularly blue-collar women already displaying hesitation about Romney-that could enormously complicate the electoral math for the GOP. “The positions that [Ryan] has taken on Social Security and Medicare reform could alienate older white voters, and especially older white women, whose support is crucial to Romney’s chances,” said Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist. “These older white voters don’t care very much for President Obama, but they love their Medicare and Social Security benefits.”
Meanwhile, the events of the weekend and the way conservatives have embraced Ryan underscore another reality: the all-but-verbal repudiation by many conservatives of the kind of “compassionate conservatism” Republicanism typified by George W. Bush.
The big question: will the Ryan choice in the end prove to be Sarah Palin II? Will it eventually prove to be a choice that meant huge conservative, adoring crowds, hours of praise and not too subtle campaigning for Ryan on Fox News, but in the end appeal mostly to the existing political choir?
Can a GOP ticket win in a “mobilization election” if it also loses the biggest chunk of independent voters, minority voters and women?
Does Paul Ryan have the political chops to appeal to more than those who have been gushing about him being a “rock star,” someone who works out regularly, and is one of the younger political figures to be on a national ticket in recent years?
Or will independent voters, many women, minority voters and seniors in the end end feel he should go back to driving a Wienermobile — and put Romney on the roof?
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.