Romney and Ryan at a pancake breakfast in Milwaukee. Do these guys look like father and son or what? (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Heaven forbid the media not have a horse race to cover. Thus, on the heels of Mitt Romney’s triple primary win on Tuesday, political coverage has shifted from delegate counts and Rick Santorum’s position on birth control to what Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post calls the “veepstakes.” Calculating the vice presidential chances of various Republican governors and senators is the ultimate Washington parlor game; Cillizza, the self-professed political junkie who writes the Post’s “Fix” blog, released his first top-ten list of potential recruits last month. Appropriately for a guessing game in which the only man with the answers — Mitt Romney — is resolutely close-mouthed, the odds placed on any particular candidate can swing wildly from one day to the next. The Romney camp is certainly not giving away any secrets; when asked by Jay Leno for one-word characterizations of a list of VP prospects, Romney’s responses were a study in blandness: “creative” (Paul Ryan), “indomitable” (Chris Christie).
Ryan, as it happens, is the latest front-runner, eclipsing such earlier best bets as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty. A day after President Obama linked Romney to Ryan in a speech at the annual Associated Press luncheon, attempting to hang Ryan’s “radical” and “laughable” budget around the presumptive nominee’s neck, Romney responded not by pushing Ryan away but by tightening the embrace. He campaigned extensively with Ryan, a Wisconsin representative, during the run-up to that state’s primary, and defended Ryan enthusiastically in his own speech to the editors organization on Wednesday. Describing Ryan as someone who, “unlike this president, has had the courage to offer serious solutions to the problems we face,” Romney evidently sees his close relationship with the GOP’s favorite deficit hawk as an advantage, not a liability. The Washington Post notes that, in the eyes of Republicans, Ryan’s strengths pair perfectly with Romney’s weaknesses: “Where some conservatives see Romney as an ideological squish, they consider Ryan not only a conservative of conviction but one of the movement’s intellectual champions.” It’s an interesting observation, considering that doubts about Romney more often center on his social-issues credentials than his fiscal conservatism (though Rick Santorum has charged Romney with “dramatically” raising taxes), but Ryan is undeniably the party’s intellectual light. As Paul Krugman would say, he is viewed as a Very Serious Person, despite the fact that the savings outlined his Path to Prosperity budget are no more specific than “repealing tax breaks” (which ones?) and “cutting spending” (from which programs?). When conservative pundits gush over Ryan, words like “genius” are used without a hint of irony. The Post also suggests that Ryan might help Romney among working-class voters, given the Wisconsin representative’s blue-collar roots. (That Ryan was raised on Social Security survivor benefits after his father died of a heart attack has apparently not endeared him to the “entitlement” system.) It’s somewhat surprising that the wonky, numbers-driven Ryan is an asset on the campaign trail, but he connects easily with the Joe-the-Plumber types that the GOP claims to represent. Per the Post’s account:
Ryan talked casually about having been on “a road to opportunity” when he flipped burgers at a McDonald’s as a teenager, sold bologna — “real bologna, by the way” — for Oscar Mayer and waited tables to help pay back his student loans.
(I can see the DNC attack ad now: “Paul Ryan knows all about real bologna — just look at his budget.”)
This buddy act, along with President Obama’s concerted effort to link the men, led Chris Cillizza to upgrade Ryan from tenth place in the Veepstakes rankings. He writes: “It’s not hard to imagine this thought in Romney headquarters this morning: You want to make the Ryan plan the centerpiece of this campaign? Fine. Game on. That’s a fight we want.” Indeed, it’s hard to find an tactical issue on which Republicans and Democrats are more starkly divided. Obama’s team genuinely thinks it can sink Romney by yoking him to the author of “The Path to Prosperity,” while conservative bigwigs are falling all over themselves to applaud the relationship. Jed Babbin, writing in the conservative magazine American Spectator, calls Ryan “the best and most fact-driven running mate choice for Mitt Romney,” going so far as to assert that “the case for Ryan appears too compelling to avoid.” Babbin, who declares the Wisconsin representative “precisely the man he needs at his side throughout the fall campaign,” believes Ryan will add “star power” to Romney’s thus-far “lackluster” economic prescriptions and can contribute a vision for Medicare that will counter the past sin of “Romneycare.”
These purported strengths, however, are painted as weaknesses by such liberal pundits as the Post’s Matt Miller, who deems Romney’s embrace of the Ryan budget a “marvelous misjudgment.” Miller predicts independent voters will react with “shock and revulsion” when the Obama campaign succeeds in “pound[ing] home what is sure to be a Democratic mantra this year: all the things that could be bought with the $150,000 average annual tax cut that top American earners stand to get if Romney and Ryan have their way.” Romney, of course, is wagering that independents will not be so easily swayed, and that the all-important voter bloc will reward what he considers fiscal probity. Miller is not alone in assuming Republicans are “sticking their heads in the noose again”; as John Heilemann writes in New York Magazine,
Judging from Obama’s speech yesterday, Romney-Ryan is the new Dole-Gingrich. Please recall that in 1996, Bill Clinton’s campaign spent the spring hanging the controversial Speaker of the House around the septuagenarian senator’s neck like a twenty-ton anvil — and in the process effectively won the general election six months early. Team Obama, like the rest of the Democratic Party, is confident that the same stratagem can work again.
Even the down-home folksiness that straight news articles attribute to Ryan is up for debate in the partisan arena. Where Babbin refers to Ryan as “likeable . . . a warm, personable kind of guy” who “seems comfortable speaking in terms people use at their kitchen table,” left-wing columnist Eugene Robinson claims that “Ryan is even less charismatic on the stump than Romney.” Despite Ryan’s ominous YouTube videos of himself stalking the halls of Congress, a la Buffy the Budget Slayer, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here. Romney didn’t spend four days campaigning with Ryan in Wisconsin for nothing; the congressman obviously has a common touch that works well enough in his home state, where the Times noted he “joined [Romney] at town-hall meetings” and “schooled him on the pleasures of a ButterBurger.” When Miller wonders whether Romney will be able to “extricate himself from being tied to Ryan as Dole was to Gingrich,” it seems the more relevant question is whether Romney will even want to.
As bad as Ryan’s budget is — and it is bad, aiming to hold all discretionary spending (food stamps, infrastructure, research funding) below 3.75% of GDP when defense spending alone has never dipped below 4.00% — it may not pose much of a threat to the GOP base. Ryan deliberately constructed his proposal to go easy on the average Republican voter (old, white and wealthy) while sticking it to constituencies that typically vote Democratic (young, diverse and poorer). For all the attention paid to Ryan’s plan to replace Medicare with a “premium support” voucher system, the real cuts come to domestic programs like Medicaid, food stamps and welfare that mostly benefit the “entitled” people that the Tea Party loves to hate. “The Path to Prosperity” may be immoral in the eyes of liberals — Paul Krugman, in a brilliant bit of rhetoric, called it “pink slime” — but it’s not a huge liability among senior citizens in Milwaukee or Dubuque.
Carbon copy button-downs, carbon-copy tykes from the prop shop. (Image: ABACAUSA)
One thing Ryan wouldn’t bring to the ticket is specific demographic appeal. Yes, Chris Cillizza notes the advantage of having a running mate who is “telegenic, beloved by tea party conservatives and from a swing state like Wisconsin,” but Ryan is no Marco Rubio or Susana Martinez. He is pretty much Mitt Romney, just twenty years younger. He would not bring in the Hispanic vote that even Republican pollsters admit will be crucial to winning the nomination. (Of course, the reality is that even a Spanish-speaking VP may not be able to save Mitt “Self-Deportation” Romney on this one.) Quite obviously, Ryan is also not female; unlike, say, Nikki Haley, he will not do much to erase the 18-point advantage President Obama currently holds among women in swing states. It must be said, however, that there is danger in picking a running mate based on the simplistic notion that people will vote for the candidate who shares their skin color or bust size. Heck, I would sooner vote for Anthony Weiner than Sarah Palin, and I assume other slices of the electorate feel the same way about “their” candidates.
In reality, it’s far too early to know who will rise to the top of Romney’s VP pool. Babbin points out the obvious when he writes that “Mitt Romney will choose his running mate based on whatever criteria he has in his mind. Frank Bruni, in a wonderfully comedic Monday column for the Times, dismisses all this Veepstakes talk by observing that, when Romney chooses his running mate in four months, “the national mood and state of the race — two of the most important factors in any selection — could be significantly different then than they are now.” The eventual choice could be as unknown now as Sarah Palin was in early 2008. Bruni also reminds us that running mates are hardly the make-or-break factors in an election that the talking heads on CNN would have us think:
You show me a voter so taken with a vice presidential nominee that he or she swallows real reservations to vote for the ticket and I’ll show you a member of the veep-to-be’s extended family or someone else angling for an invitation to the inauguration.
Ah, yes, but despite the vice president’s relative unimportance (John Nance Garner, Teddy Roosevelt’s VP, supposedly referred to his job as “not worth a bucket of warm spit”), once the Republican nominee has been chosen, the Veepstakes is the only game in town. The Post’s Chris Cillizza exudes the dorkiness of political junkies: “There is nothing — literally, nothing — that the Fix loves more in politics than the speculation surrounding who the presidential candidate will pick as his vice presidential running mate.” Meaningless guessing games, a vast waste of time on something that is not Fantasy Football — what’s not to love?
It doesn’t get much better than this, folks.
(Part II of the Veepstakes, Non-Ryan Edition, coming soon . . . .)
. . . So Well Read. . . 