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Conservative anxiety has stalked Mitt Romney since the
outset of his presidential campaign, expressing itself in a series of hopes
that a nominee who was not Romney might win, and then, after his nomination
became inevitable, as endless caterwauling for Romney himself to act less …
Romney-like. Romney’s vice-presidential selection has begun to serve as a
stand-in for these demands, and as recently as a week ago, they split between
calls for him to pick Paul Ryan and calls for Marco Rubio.
But since then, Romney’s position has steadily eroded,
intensifying the conservative panic. And a report by National Review’s Robert
Costa that Romney was giving Ryan strong consideration focused all the
attention on the dreamy House Budget Committee chairman and unofficial party
leader. Suddenly Ryan’s potential nomination has become the sole locus of the conservative
movement’s longings.
The reason Ryan had earlier been deemed unlikely was that
Romney intended to run a campaign focused entirely on the economy. His
reasoning was sound enough. Romney’s status as the challenger during an
economic crisis with mass unemployment was a gigantic asset, but it was (aside
from his growing Superpac advantage) his only asset. America still hated the
Republican Party, hated its Congressional wing, and bitterly opposed the fiscal
priorities it championed. Romney understood that he needed to bring together
nearly every voter dispirited with the status quo, and not only those also
eager to join a crusade to smash the welfare state.
Conservatives had been itching to enlist Romney more openly
in just such a crusade, out of the same overweening ideological confidence that
drove them to enlist the Republican Congress. And Romney’s campaign plan has
begun to look increasingly shaky. Obama has successfully defined him as a
self-interested agent of his economic class. Polls have shown that Romney’s
perceived advantage in handling the economy, his only advantage, has dwindled
to little or nothing. (The latest Fox News poll has Romney’s advantage on the
economy dropping from 7 points to 3; in CNN’s poll, just 29 percent agreed that
the economy will improve only if Romney wins — this is his entire campaign
premise! — while 31 percent said it would improve only if Obama wins.)
The oft-repeated conservative argument for Ryan is that
Romney has already endorsed the Ryan plan closely enough to incur its
liabilities, so he might as well pick the politician best equipped to defend
it. There’s certainly something to this. Ryan gets too little credit for his
political skills. He has won consistently in a moderate district. He has
managed to build a reputation among the national press corps as a thoughtful,
compromise-friendly moderate while hewing to the right wing of his party. The
major argument of my profile of Ryan from last spring is that his public
persona is a giant scam; but pulling off a scam like that is the mark of a
skillful pol.
On the other hand, Ryan’s capacity for national-level
wholesale politics has yet to be proven. He has masterfully played the
Washington press corps, but it remains largely an inside game. Most Americans
have not formed an opinion about him. He has a long record of radical votes and
is the functional leader of a wildly unpopular Congressional wing. The one real
electoral test of his plan’s political tolerability came in a special election
in a Republican district in upstate New York in 2011, in which an underdog
Democrat swept to victory by relentlessly pounding Ryan’s plan, and especially
its provision to privatize Medicare.
At this point, joining Ryan to the ticket would be a huge
gamble. Romney would be tapping into Ryan’s immense political talent, but
giving up on his win-by-default strategy that has taken a beating but might
look good again if, say, some international disaster craters the recovery
between now and November. In any case, the conservative drumbeat for Ryan has
grown so overwhelming that it’s no longer even clear that Romney could turn
Ryan down for an Incredibly Boring White Guy, even if he wants to. The
Republican Party belongs to Ryan.
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