Friday, August 10, 2012

USS Wisconsin - The rumors are running hot that Wisconsin rep Paul Ryan will be Mitt Romney's choice for Vice President.  As a longtime fan of fiscal sanity, I would love to see Ryan on the ticket.

10 comments:

Ryan's Hope said...

The Ryan pick, along with Thursday's "please stop hurting me" truce offer, represents Romney at his weakest point of the campaign. This is all about shoring up the base which any adequate candidate would have long since shored up. Ryan won't even bring Wisconsin into play; if Romney wins that state, he will already have won a dozen other mid-pack states first.

From day one, the Obama campaign plan has been to tie Mitt Romney to Paul Ryan's budget and hobbling/privatizing/ending Medicare and 1% vs. 99%. The attacks on Romney's business record are a buildup to that, and they have drawn some serious blood, particularly in swing states.

Romney is saying, bring it on. That's an foolish choice, since what Romney should want the election to be about is Obama's stewardship of the economy, not a radical plan for the economy that Romney only endorsed when backed into a corner during the primaries, and which the well-known liberal Newt Gingrich blasted as "rightwing social engineering." George W. Bush could never sell the public on his unpopular but less contentious and less sweeping Social Security partial privatization proposal, even given all his advantages, and without the distractions and obstacles of a campaign, and despite prioritizing it for several years. Good luck to Romney & Ryan in trying to push an even less popular plan from their losing electoral starting position in just three months.

Bottom line: This is a pick you only make when you're 100 electoral votes behind. Romney's going all in with a pair of 5's.

Denise said...

Good pick~
It is time for some leadership in Washington. We need some folks to make the hard decisions and start working for the country and not the next election.
1200 plus days without a budget is ridiculous. We need a budget and we need to spend within our budget.

"Fiscal Sanity" said...

Forget about the 1%. If Paul Ryan's budget plan had been law in 2010, Mitt Romney's tax rate would have been 0.8%.

Eric said...

Ryan's Hope: that's a lot of declaration without exposition.

Ryan won't even bring Wisconsin in play? Is this the same Wisconsin that just affirmed Scott Walker again?

Just curious: are you cut-and-pasting this long comment at all the conservative blogs? Methinks you do protest too much.

We can agree: the VP debate will be fun.

Nigel Tufnel said...

Obama supporters should not underestimate the impact of energizing the base. Bush the Younger used that tactic to win in 2004.

It can be particularly effective when the the general public has become disenchanted/disengaged with both parties.

Obama's campaign may be best off trying to marginalize Ryan and keep the focus on Romney.

Eric said...

Hey, Nigel! It's good to have a regular commenter here. Makes me feel like somebody is reading.

My traffic always spikes around election times.

Kenosha Pete said...

Ryan won't even bring Wisconsin in play? Is this the same Wisconsin that just affirmed Scott Walker again?

Same is right; Walker won by an unchanged margin from 2010. And it's the same Wisconsin that elected the "team" of Ryan and Obama.

Despite some erosion of his 2008 national numbers, Barack Obama's edge in Wisconsin polls, all post-Walker, is larger now than his state win from four years ago. It is currently one of the safer swing states from the Democratic point of view. Wisconsin is not mathematically unobtainable for Romney. But should he succeed in picking it off, it would be due to a coast-to-coast shift that would have previously flipped a fifth of the electoral college his way. The beginnings of this dynamic are, diplomatically speaking, not yet visible.

Simply put, Wisconsin will not deliver the 270th electoral vote. (Or the 290th.) That's something that advocates of Rob Portman and Marco Rubio weren't just blowing smoke about.

It isn't the biggest deal, since choosing a VP in order to get their state has fallen out of favor in recent decades, but neither is it quantum physics.

Eric said...

Obama won Wisconsin by 13.9% in 2008 and the Real Clear Politics average shows him with a 5.4% advantage, pre-Ryan announcement.

That's "some" erosion.

Here's a little trivia for you, true believer: no President has been re-elected who did not expand the states he won in the first election. Can you name any states Obama will pick up this time?

Kenosha Pete said...

Here's a little trivia for you, true believer: no President has been re-elected who did not expand the states he won in the first election.

Franklin Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt (again), and Woodrow Wilson beg to differ.

But your correction on Wisconsin percentages is also correct; I'd looked at a site which listed a 3.9% win in 2008, not 13.9% - obviously a typo. I should have shopped around.

I said some erosion of the national numbers; Obama won by 7% last time, and he's up by 4.7% on RealClear now. As for Wisconsin, Fivethirtyeight.com's new, updated projection has Obama winning by more than 5% after specifically factoring in the impact that Paul Ryan should have on his state's result.

The tactical problem remains: eroded Obama has a lead in Wisconsin beyond the margin of error. Paul Ryan won't be delivering 3 or 4 points. Romney will not win Wisconsin without having won North Carolina, Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada and probably Pennsylvania first. Romney hasn't run a campaign ad in Pennsylvania since April.

Here's some more trivia: no incumbent President's opponent has ever had a negative approval rating, let alone been elected with one. Mitt Romney's appeal makes John Kerry's lopk robust.

Ryan's Hope said...

Just curious: are you cut-and-pasting this long comment at all the conservative blogs? Methinks you do protest too much.

Ha! Good one! By the way, methinks I enjoyed your 8/14 Hot Air-Corner-Washington Post link pile on Medicare, with bonus commentary from the Weekly Standard and Reason.com.