, member of the United States House of Represe...

Not just Palin around

What does the choice of Paul Ryan as Vice Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date mean for the cam­paign of Willard “Mitt” Romney?

A vice pres­i­den­tial run­ning mate is often cho­sen for a num­ber of rea­sons — to bal­ance the ticket geo­graph­i­cally or ide­o­log­i­cally, to sat­isfy the demands of some branch of the president’s party, to attract a par­tic­u­lar group of vot­ers, to fill some per­ceived weak­ness in the Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. Does Ryan bring any of this to the ticket?

Back in May, many com­men­ta­tors were not­ing Romney’s need and desire to avoid mak­ing the sorts of mis­takes Sen­a­tor John McCain made in his dis­as­trous 2008 cam­paign. Among them was his choice of then Alaska Gov­er­nor Sarah Palin as a run­ning mate. At first glance, the choice of Ryan seems to have met the require­ment to be unPalin. But how well does Ryan sat­isfy this?

In as far as the tra­di­tional rea­sons for choos­ing a Vice Pres­i­dent — ticket bal­ance, party demands, attract­ing vot­ers, per­ceived weak­ness — Ryan is not the usual sort of choice. As regards what is per­haps the most vital need this time around — to not be Romney’s Palin — he fails miserably.

For regional or ide­o­log­i­cal bal­ance, Ryan doesn’t seem to actu­ally change much. Rom­ney had roots in the Mid­west, his father hav­ing been Gov­er­nor of Michi­gan. Ryan holds a House seat from Wis­con­sin. True, the younger Rom­ney has recently been asso­ci­ated more with the North­east, enough so that Newt Gin­grich called him a “Mass­a­chu­setts mod­er­ate” (and he didn’t mean that as a com­pli­ment). And Rom­ney would ben­e­fit greatly from Wisconsin’s elec­toral votes. He prob­a­bly can’t win the elec­tion with­out them.

Had Rom­ney not taken such a strong anti-​​Midwestern stance (as when he famously said four years ago we should “Let Detroit Go Bank­rupt”), he could have played on his father’s Mid­west­ern roots as for­mer Michi­gan Gov­er­nor and for­mer Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer of Amer­i­can Motors. But hav­ing slammed that door, he may need some­one like Ryan to con­nect his can­di­dacy to the heart of the coun­try. This may be “geo­graphic bal­ance,” but it is a bal­ance Rom­ney shouldn’t have needed.

Ide­o­log­i­cally, Ryan seems to fit a need to estab­lish far-​​right cre­den­tials for Rom­ney. The loud and ener­getic tea-​​drinking wing of the Party demanded they be given some sort of bone after a series of their dar­lings (Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Michele Bach­mann (R-​​Stillwater, MN), Texas Gov­er­nor Rick Perry, Her­man Cain, Don­ald Trump, for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia Sen­a­tor Rick San­to­rum, for­mer House Speaker Newt Gin­grich) folded under the weight of actu­ally being seen and heard in pub­lic. One can’t say this is “ide­o­log­i­cal bal­ance” — one can­not “bal­ance” the right with the rad­i­cal extreme right — but it is an attempt to bow to the demands of what has become an impor­tant part of Romney’s party.

Polls seem to indi­cate that the enthu­si­as­tic clique of Repub­li­can vot­ers con­sists pri­mar­ily of Tea Partiers, who are not par­tic­u­larly enthu­si­as­tic about Rom­ney. They do, how­ever, appear to love Paul Ryan, plac­ing him into that series of beloved dar­lings. It would seem, then, that Ryan can help both to address some of the intra-​​party squab­bles within the Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment, and to draw some vot­ers who are enthu­si­as­tic, but not for Rom­ney. In both cases, how­ever, the choice of Ryan is an admis­sion of fail­ure on Romney’s part. Hav­ing won the Repub­li­can pri­maries, he should be able at least to excite and unite his own Party. He can’t.

Note here the con­trast with Barack Obama in 2008. He went through a bruis­ing pri­mary strug­gle with Hillary Clin­ton, but it was bruis­ing because both can­di­dates gen­er­ated gen­uine pas­sion, not because the party’s vot­ers were des­per­ate to find some­one — any­one — other than the party’s even­tual nom­i­nee. (Remem­ber all the dis­cus­sion about the newest not-​​Romney? Democ­rats in 2008 never longed for a not-​​Obama.) And Obama’s solu­tion to the bat­tle was to gen­uinely address and sat­isfy the con­cerns of Clin­ton sup­port­ers, not to find some­one else who could do it for him. Ryan will be a con­stant liv­ing, breath­ing reminder that Rom­ney, as head of the Repub­li­can Party, can­not actu­ally lead it on his own.

One thing Ryan doesn’t do is expand the Repub­li­can base. He doesn’t draw mod­er­ate vot­ers into the tent. His attrac­tion is to the right­ist fringe. Recall all the talk dur­ing the pri­maries, that Rom­ney had to swing right to win the nom­i­na­tion, and would have to find a way to tack toward the cen­ter in the gen­eral cam­paign. Appar­ently, Rom­ney has aban­doned this course, admit­ting he was unable to pull in even the Repub­li­can wing of the Repub­li­can party. He still has to worry about draw­ing in his sup­posed base. The choice of Ryan is a sig­nal that there will be no out­reach to mod­er­ates or inde­pen­dents, because Rom­ney has still failed to draw even the con­ser­v­a­tives to whom he so des­per­ately pan­dered in the pri­maries. Ryan is an admis­sion of failure.

Regard­ing Romney’s weak­nesses as a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and as a poten­tial pres­i­dent, what are the things Rom­ney lacks? He has no for­eign pol­icy knowl­edge or expe­ri­ence. He has no par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence in the law or the Con­sti­tu­tion. He has no mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence, hav­ing avoided the Viet­nam draft while encour­ag­ing oth­ers to go. He seems to know lit­tle or noth­ing about sci­ence or sci­en­tific pol­icy. He did have some exec­u­tive expe­ri­ence, hav­ing served one term as Gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts, but he doesn’t want any­one to look at that record (“I didn’t inhale”), so he might as well never have had it.

The only aspect of any of this that Ryan could con­ceiv­ably fill has to do with the law, hav­ing been a law­maker since 1999, and hav­ing been a Con­gres­sional staffer for a few years before that. But this is not some­thing Repub­li­cans like these days, with their hatred for gov­ern­ment and con­tempt for Wash­ing­ton. The weak­ness of Romney’s that Ryan can fill is some­thing that nei­ther Rom­ney nor Ryan will want to stress — that Ryan has been a Wash­ing­ton insider for two decades.

In other words, Ryan doesn’t effec­tively fill any of Romney’s many weak­nesses. In any other year, Romney’s lack of knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence in gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary and for­eign affairs and the law — in, that is, every area that the Pres­i­dent is sup­posed to address — might be an issue. But this year, the cam­paign is about the econ­omy, and Rom­ney is run­ning on his eco­nomic exper­tise. Keep in mind, Repub­li­cans tra­di­tion­ally claim that the Pres­i­dent doesn’t have much say in eco­nomic mat­ters — Con­gress, not Clin­ton, bal­anced the bud­get, and Con­gress, not Rea­gan, is respon­si­ble for the enor­mous deficits of the 1980s. The Pres­i­dent can­not enact bud­gets or estab­lish taxes or set inter­est rates. Yet Rom­ney (while not want­ing to talk about his time at Bain Cap­i­tal) is run­ning on his sup­posed eco­nomic acumen.

What does Ryan bring to this? Well, he brings the Ryan Bud­get and his plan to replace Medicare with a voucher sys­tem. Whether one approves of these pro­pos­als or not, they are still more reminders that Rom­ney could not, on his own, make the case for him­self as an eco­nom­ics wonk. Ryan does fill a per­ceived weak­ness here — but it is a weak­ness at the heart of Romney’s can­di­dacy, a hole in what was sup­posed to be Romney’s entire rea­son for his candidacy.

This leaves Ryan as merely not-​​Palin. At first glance, he would seem to fit this anti-​​role well. He’s male, she’s female. She quickly devel­oped a rep­u­ta­tion for being some­thing of an air­head, whereas Ryan is con­sid­ered a bona fide pol­icy wonk. Clearly, Ryan is not Palin. But there, the dis­sim­i­lar­ity ends. Just as with Sarah Palin, he’s young, he’s attrac­tive, his pol­i­tics are from the extreme right, and, most impor­tantly, he was brought on board to inject some excite­ment into a lack­lus­ter campaign.

Ryan, in other words, appears to be Romney’s attempt at a game-​​changer. Ryan is Romney’s admis­sion that, until now, he has been los­ing, and if some­thing dras­tic doesn’t hap­pen, Rom­ney will lose.

Ryan brings noth­ing of sig­nif­i­cant sub­stance to the ticket, other than things that Rom­ney should have had to begin with, or as a sop to an insur­gency within the Party that doesn’t like its own nom­i­nee. Ryan is a Hail Mary pass, a trick play that the coach hauls out at the last minute in total des­per­a­tion. The Rom­ney cam­paign has become “A vote for Rom­ney is a vote for Ryan” — but Amer­i­cans do not go to the polls to elect a Vice President.

That was pre­cisely Sarah Palin’s role in the McCain cam­paign. In other words, Ryan is Romney’s Palin. Ryan actu­ally changes noth­ing. He sim­ply brings Romney’s fail­ures and inad­e­quacy into sharper focus.

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