By selecting Paul Ryan as his running mate, is Romney giving in to the most strident conservatives and giving up on moderates and independent voters?
UPDATE: This person definitely thinks so:
After a blasting in the polls and a haranguing by right-wing pundits, Mitt Romney decided that he should use the biggest statement of his primary campaign to try to win over a group of voters that never wanted him: right-wing Republicans. It’s exactly what John McCain tried to do. And I’m trying to remember: How did that work out for him?
UPDATE 2: Ezra Klein has an excellent article on what picking Paul Ryan means:
Ryan has told the Congressional Budget Office that his budget will bring all federal spending outside Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. That means defense, infrastructure, education, food safety, basic research, and food stamps — to name just a few — will be less than four percent of GDP in 2050. To get a sense for how unrealistic that is, Congress has never permitted defense spending to fall below three percent of GDP, and Romney has pledged that he’ll never let defense spending fall beneath four percent of GDP. It will be interesting to hear him explain away the difference.
But Klein’s most interesting point is that Romney seems to have picked the VP that Obama was steering him toward:
This election increasingly resembles the Obama campaign’s strategy rather than the Romney campaign’s strategy. … While Republicans were trying to keep Ryan quiet, the Obama administration was trying to make him famous. They saw his plans as the clearest distillation of the GOP’s governing philosophy — and they thought it would drive voters towards the Democrats. We’ll know in November whether that was a genius strategy or an epic miscalculation.
7 Comments
President magic underwear and Vice-President the Earth is six thousand years old.
What century are we living in?
Romney blew it I think. Getting a center right person would have made this race close. He’d better hope that europe blows up.
Interesting article about romney. Obviously a smart guy and with a better VP candidate may actually turn out to be a good president but the article isn’t too flattering. I wonder why the dems don’t criticize his record as governor more often.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/what-romneys-run-with-the-big-dig-tells-us-about-how-hed-manage-america/2012/08/10/f78ee398-ba2d-11e1-abd4-aecc81b4466d_story.html
IK – yes, that’s what he did. Ryan is intelligent and articulate, and appeals to the Republican base both for being ultra conservative and for passionately wanting to transform the country.
So Ryan will help turn out the base, and lose some moderates.
I think that Romney made a very reasonable choice given the stupid requirements of his patry.
Paul Ryan’s voting record in Congress: http://www.ontheissues.org/House/Paul_Ryan.htm
hee hee. Romney introduced Paul Ryan this morning as “the next president of the United States”. In his defense, Obama made a similar mistake when he introduced Joe Biden in 2008.
Romney’ making sure his base comes out and votes for him. With all the voter ID laws, he knows that alot of Democrat voters won’t be able to vote, so he just needs to make sure he gets all of the Republican votes.