Although Paul Ryan undoubtedly has some political and personal skills and will inject some much-needed energy into the Romney campaign, it isn’t too hard to figure out why Democrats are elated about his selection. First, let’s look at what picking House Republican Paul Ryan didn’t do.
1. It didn’t help Romney with women.
2. It didn’t help Romney make any inroads with blacks, Latinos, Asians, or Muslims.
3. It didn’t boost confidence in a Romney administration’s preparedness to handle foreign policy, a la Dick Cheney.
4. It didn’t force the Obama administration to defend new territory.
5. It didn’t deflect attention from Romney’s tax returns/avoidance.
6. It didn’t help Romney move to the middle.
7. It didn’t isolate Romney from the wildly unpopular House Republicans.
And let’s look at what picking Ryan did do:
1. It forced Romney to try and fail to distance himself from Paul Ryan’s budget plan. Romney now says he would have signed Ryan’s budget, and he therefore owns a budget plan so unpopular that people don’t even believe it was actually proposed.
2. It locked Romney in to a plan that raises taxes on lower middle class folks while effectively zeroing out his own taxes.
3. It locked Romney into a program that voucherizes Medicare, and twins him with a candidate who wants to privatize Social Security.
4. It, therefore, weakened Romney substantially with white working class voters and with seniors, who both hate the Ryan Budget with a white hot passion once they learn the details of it.
5. It saved the Obama administration the cost and difficulty of tying Paul Ryan and the House Republicans to Mitt Romney.
6. It created the best conceivable opening for Democrats running in difficult heavily-white states and districts.
7. It turned a battle of personalities, which polls showed Romney was losing narrowly, into a battle of ideologies, which polls show Romney will lose decisively.
For more on those polling numbers, take a look at Ron Brownstein’s latest piece. Mr. Brownstein also sees the Ryan pick as potentially disastrous to Romney’s chances.
Ryan’s ambitious budget blueprint, as passed twice by House Republicans over the past two years, crystallizes the GOP’s highest policy priority: shrinking the size of the federal government, largely by dramatically restructuring entitlement programs led by Medicare and Medicaid. But the GOP today is increasingly dependent on the votes of older and blue-collar whites who — while eager to scale back government programs that transfer income to the poor — are much more resistant to retrenching entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security that largely benefit the middle-class.
If we assume that we are talking about voters who are leaning Republican because they don’t like paying taxes that are then spent on the truly poor, you could hardly do worse than to propose raising their taxes, slashing their earned benefits, and giving all the money to the rich rather than using it to aggressively pay down the deficit.
What this means is that the Romney campaign will have to leave any semblance of the truth completely out of their campaign rhetoric. They will have to do whatever it takes to prevent white working class folks and seniors from believing what every independent analyst is telling them. And they will have to stoke whatever anxieties they can to convince these voters that Obama is not on their side.
It’s a recipe for a very racialized campaign. It is not going to be pretty. I don’t think Romney is good at playing that kind of game, and I’m not sure Paul Ryan is even willing to play it. At least, I’m not sure Ryan is willing to play it to the hilt, in Sarah Palin style.
That means, we’re probably talking Super PACs: Billionaire-funded racism, in the Donald Trump mode.
I don’t see any other way this works. If they aren’t very aggressive, Obama will begin to peel off a share of the only remaining areas of Republican strength. And that will have a huge impact on the House and Senate races.
