The pundits will give all sorts of reasons why Mitt Romney picked Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. They will say it’s an attempt to rev up the right wing of his party and pull in even more big bucks from its campaign contributors. They might also say it will help Romney’s chances with Ryan’s present constituency in swing state Wisconsin.
This is all probably correct. But I think there was a more personal reason at work here.
Mitt Romney has been feeling badly misunderstood in recent weeks. Feeling deeply unappreciated for the great good he did at Bain Capital. The way he took a small personal fortune and ramped it up into a huge personal fortune via a Wall Street private equity-cum-vulture fund. This “achievement,” in his mind, has been twisted into a negative example of how The Street and its creatures (like Bain) have waxed wealthier at the expense of everyone else.
And then there appears this young Rep. Paul Ryan, whose proposed budget plan will provide still more capital in the form of tax relief to exactly people like Romney himself who fancy they are the best-and-brightest creators of exactly the kind of America he wishes America to become to an even greater extent. A country with an economy that grows, but where all the growth trickles upward.
Ryan, the Ayn Rand acolyte, sees in Romney a man of the “manager class” that in Rand’s view rightly rules, and without whom all of society falters. Romney basks in such twaddle.
Of course Romney wants this guy at his side as they go forth to see that them what’s got gets still more.