It doesn’t surprise me to learn that President Obama was mystified when he learned that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) had been selected as Mitt Romney’s running mate. I could never understand the reasoning behind it, either. For starters, I thought that after the debacle with Sarah Palin, Romney would want to pick someone with obvious stature on the world stage. He’d want someone that everyone could instantly envision being commander-in-chief. Maybe Dick Lugar was too old, but there had to be someone with foreign policy chops that he could choose. Secondly, if he wasn’t going to go for foreign policy experience, he should have stayed away from Washington DC entirely and found a governor to run with. Thirdly, if he was going to pick someone from Washington DC, he should have found someone who wasn’t the very symbol of gridlock and austerity. The Ryan Budget plan wasn’t all that well known by the general public, but it polled about as well as an outbreak of cholera.
And one last point. Four years earlier, John McCain had looked at his problems with the conservative base of the party and concluded that he needed to reassure them and get them fired up with his selection of running mate. While it’s true that Sarah Palin wasn’t sufficiently vetted and turned out to have more problems than Team McCain could have ever imagined, she did fire up the base. Yet, it didn’t even come close to winning them the election.
If for no other reason than having some respect for Einstein’s definition of insanity, Romney should have tried to reassure the middle rather than repeating McCain’s strategy of trying to reassure the base. I don’t even think Paul Ryan did much to fire up the base, because he’s a fairly unassuming guy. Most people didn’t know who he was, and the people who were familiar with his budget and liked his ideas were already politically engaged and very likely to vote. At best, the selection of Ryan helped increase the numbers and morale of Romney’s volunteers. Perhaps he got a little boost in political contributions. But, that’s it.
It was a very strange choice made by a very strange man.
I see Romney was on meet the press. Dod5he say anything remotely of interest?
I doubt it.
It showed that Romney had the primary voters but not the GOP infrastructure behind him, which is a very strange place for a candidate to be. The last candidate I can think of in that position was George McGovern. And McGovern had his own vice-presidential problems. I never could figure out the selection of Eagleton other than more likely figures turned him down. That likely is also what happened to Romney.
Yeah, Eagleton was the “oh shit, what do we do now?” pick at the last possible second after McGovern finally accepted that he wasn’t going to get Ted Kennedy.
Eagleton was a rational and a traditional type of choice. Decent man, competent Senator, more conservative than McGovern (to mollify powerful Democrats), and from a must win state.
His bout of depression probably wasn’t any more severe than what large numbers of people experience at some point in their lives. He should have informed McGovern of his medical history (which he didn’t), but it shouldn’t have become public knowledge. Particularly back then when most people heard ECT and concluded that he was must be nutso.
For a rich man, Romney was extraordinarily concerned with fund-raising, and still continued to spend a lot of time on the fundraising circuit long after he should have been out on the stump. He probably figured Ryan with help his fundraising with the serious people.
What is even more extraordinary is that he didn’t seem to see a need to reach out to hispanics or women on his ticket. As a former Governor, another governor on the ticket probably wouldn’t have helped his competency or experience argument. Like it or not, he needed a teapartier to unite his party and overcome his own north East, big business, rich guy, moderate, non-Christian, white male profile.
Otherwise he had no real hope of success, but he clearly didn’t realize that right up to the election, probably because he only talked to north East, big business, rich guy, moderate, non-Christian, white male advisers…
yes, Rmoney the miser. Always struck me about Anne’s clothes – why didn’t they pay for a clothing consultant? Her clothes were obviously expensive, probably looked great in person but totally didn’t work on camera.
A Mormon wouldn’t think that way, particularly about women.
Here is an explanation that I offer, based on my own experience working with corporate executives, as a consultant:
Mitt didn’t need a team member. Because people like Mitt Romney thing they are so smart that their sh+t doesn’t stink. And he’s a rich guy. So he has basically spent most of his adult life being agreed with, even when he’s wrong.
Mitt Romney is looking for a yes-man version of himself who would be his clear junior. Ryan is perfect! The Quayle pick was a little like this.
That doesn’t make it a smart choice. Proving once again that these Management Consultant types are not so smart, except for the part where they always make sure they get all the money.
Romney couldn’t pick someone who appeared to be more competent or more likeable than himself. I think the choice of Ryan was based on looks more than anything.
Looks? Who does Paul Ryan remind you of? Not Eddie Munster?
yes Eddie Munster
Even women at liberal sites say he’s handsome. I think he has sunken zombie eyes and his nose is too big and kinked.
I felt that it was a very Quayle-esque pick. A young conservative to assure the base but did not offend like Palin did. And when you read the whole excerpt from Double Down, you realize that the choice was always Ryan. None of the others, even Christie, appealed to Romney.
It was said in Double Down that Ryan reminded Romney of those young brownnosers in the Corporate world, and that APPEALED to him. LOL.
I just posted my comment and I saw yours below – I’m totally in sync with your post
He picked a brown-nosing mini-me.
The Quayle thing too.
Of course Romney had to reassure the base. They had gone from nutjob-of-the-month to nutjob-of-the-month the entire primary campaign in an attempt to avoid nominating him. So he ran as a “severe conservative” until they were reassured. Picking Ryan helped shore up that support, and the Washington press’s man-crush on Ryan made them call the pick responsible and prudent.
Then he pivoted to the center at just the right time– during the debates. Obama clearly wasn’t ready for it. And the parts of the public that ignore the race until the debates were reassured that Romney was not a kook.
Yes to both statements. But further…Romney himself was a very “strange” choice. At least it was strange in terms of actually trying to win. But it was not so strange if he was not expected to win.
I have been saying here for quite a while that “the fix is in.” By that I do not necessarily mean that a group of Republican-allied and Democratic-allied Corporate/PermaGov movers and shakers meet in some surveillance-proof room (if indeed such a thing actually exists anymore) and decides who is to be the tomato can and who the tomato. It is a much more complex fix than that. Maybe even a cosmic one. Nevertheless, whether it’s the warp and woof of the universe, the natural ebb and flow of political power or some group of Blinky Palermo-type PermaGov fixers who decrees which candidates are to be the tomato cans and which the tomatoes, a “fix” is most obviously in. All one has to do is look at the media with a relatively unjaundiced eye to see which way the fix wind is blowing. The centrist media hold the key to the locked-up minds of the so-called “undecided” (although “non-decided,” “relatively uninvolved,” or even “too dumb to be able to make up their minds” might be more accurate descriptions) and their
caricaturizations…errr, ahhh, characterizations…of various candidates both in the primaries and in the election are what get people (s)elected or un(s)elected in national elections. In fact, this holds true in any really important election…important to the Corporate-owned-and-operated PermaGov. A casual eye cast upon on the current NYC mayoral race or the New JerseyGubernatorillaGubernatorial and Senate races is enough to establish the truth of this idea.Little Lhota vs. Big Fella DeBlasio? Please!!!
Every time they were presented in mainstream NYC media, this was the flavor:
Lhota could be the next coming of James Madison and DeBlasio could be as dumb as a stick. Who’s winning a popularity contest?
The winner.
The hawk and the mouse winner.
The image winner.
Every goddamned time.
And who “chooses” these presentations, these image wars? Up and down the line from the first time a candidate seriously tries to get in the mix until the end of the fight series?
The corp[orate-owne mainstream media choose them.
Also every goddamned time.
I think, for the most part, VP selections are pretty unimportant to the average voter unless they are obvious disasters like Palin, or Tom Eagleton. I mean, really, what tangible effect did Lloyd Bentsen have on the Dukakis campaign?
Beyond delivering the single-greatest smack-down in the history of televised debates?
I’m not sure what the impact was on the end result, but we’ll be quoting the senator for the next hundred years.
follow up is great “I did not think the comparison was well taken” eloquent and biting
The VP choice isn’t unimportant. It’s the first, and perhaps only, time the public gets an opportunity to evaluate the POTUS candidate’s decision-making skill.
At one time it was about regional political balance. As good as JFK’s selection of LBJ was in 1960, it would be a terrible choice in 2000 because today it’s more about looking like a team. GWB and Obama have ramped that up to an expectation that the VP will be an integral part of the team after the election. IMHO, Clinton made the most brilliant VP choice in living memory (and it made Quayle, and by extension Bush, look that much more ridiculous by comparison, but he didn’t quite deliver on the post-election working team. Carter’s choice of Mondale was good for the election, but he didn’t make use of what Mondale had to offer his administration.
Ryan was like Edwards; didn’t hurt and didn’t help.
This post reminds of a review/discussion I saw on one of the MSNBC shows last week of the book about the Obama/Clinton insidery stuff, specifically about how Obama and Clinton aren’t really best buds in any sense of the word.
Clinton is quoted as saying that Romney was a terrible candidate and that Obama was lucky because he had such a lousy candidate to run against. And, then there was the 47% video. So, yeah, that may have helped Obama, but my opinion is that it only offset the negative arising from his skin color. Maybe it just all balanced out.
In my opinion, anyone who couldn’t see that Romney blatantly lied over and over again and was in no sense qualified to be President were the ones with blinders on.
Clinton is such an egocentric blowhard. Romney was a much better and tougher opponent than Bob Dole, the man Clinton drew for his re-election. So bad that the creepy Ross Perot pulled in 8.4% of the vote and Dole only got 40.7%. In two POTUS elections, Clinton never got 50% plus one.
Two thoughts: foremost it has long been my contention that the Retards threw both the ought-eight and ought-twelve elections to Obama. They – the puppet masters – knew they couldn’t win with anyone following the Bush disaster, and with the way Willard forced himself into the candidacy (he was afterall the “presumptive nominee” pretty much from the gitgo) they knew they couldn’t win in twelve. Both VP choices only fired things up enough with the Ambien, Prozac, Viagra and crotch-shots on CNN/Fox Kool-Aid drinkers drooling Pavlovianly on the back seat of a nineteen sixty-nine Chevy Suburban “couch” to make it look a lot less worse than it was.
As for Einstein’s definition of insanity, the same applies to the word “faith”.
Crying Havoc! and rejoining the fray.
No fear.
The puppet-masters spent a hell of a lot of money throwing those elections.
To me and you it’s a lot of money. To Adelson and the Koch Brothers it was tip money.
I don’t see why any real puppetmasters worth their salt would care who the hell won elections.
You know I’ve always hated that “definition of insanity.” I hope it wasn’t him. It’s totally wrong and I’d like to think better of Einstein than that.
The trouble with the linked piece is that it gives all the reasons why some people thought Ryan was a poor choice, but no inkling of why some other people thought he was a great choice. Because obviously some did, and they got the better of the argument. And that was far from the only example of wishful or magical thinking in that campaign.
Ryan had been hyped to the hilt as the boy genius, rock star and super athlete of the Republican party for quite some time before. And as with many other things, the Republicans tend to fall for their own hype.
Romney was the establishment choice, and was considered a “hold your nose” candidate by the Tea Party. He was always going to be the nominee, but the establishment (Romney being one of them) felt they owed something to the base, if only to try to get a more enthusiastic turnout.
How soon we forget: they considered Ryan a “serious” policy thinker, and an attractive candidate. In some bizarro world he was: And that may be the best explanation, that guys like Romney were mentally tying themselves in knots, lost their bearings, started believing things because they needed to believe them. You might say that in order to run this campaign Romney, Rove & Co. had to check their brains at the door. And then what was left for them to go on? Polls?
As for Lugar, he had just been primaried by the teatards in May, and lost. To have nominated him would have been a slap in the face. Bad enough they had to go with Romney for pres, but Lugar for veep?
As for some more respectable “someone from Washington DC”, I can’t help noticing that you didn’t come up with any names. They couldn’t either.
As for Christie, well, the article speaks for itself. But what came across at the time was that Christie really did not want to run and seemed to dislike Romney.
Don’t get me wrong, Ryan was indeed a “strange choice”, but the strangeness was not so much in Romney or even the GOP establishment as in the existential logic of the Republican situation, trying to win a national election while beholden to a rabid, regional base, Shelly Adelson, and the Kochtopus.
That said, the main difference between most of the Republican establishment and the teahadists is that the former are not insane, not that their goals are really that much different. And there’s a reason their goals are not much different. Until very recently, the establishment viewed the tea party as a powerful tool to help them reach their own goals — and Ryan is a great example of that. So let’s not kid ourselves that about what the Republican makeover is really about.
Satisfied the Beltway and didn’t turn off the teabaggers. Probably the best he could have hoped for given that there wasn’t anyone available that could have turned his campaign into a winner.
That’s about it.
I too think, for the most part, VP selections are pretty unimportant to the average voter unless they are obvious disasters like Palin, or Tom Eagleton.
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