Dispatch #17

Today Mitt Romney named Wisconsin House Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate and Vice-Presidential candidate. By doing so he has further ingratiated himself with the right wing of his party to insure conservative moral support and campaign activity on his behalf in the general election. Accused in the Republican primary of not being sufficiently conservative, he has taken every opportunity to belie that charge. If you don’t really have a national vision or a grounded political philosophy, as I suspect Mitt Romney has not, you make your decision based on the basis of political, that is to say electoral, expediency. Get the 50.5%. Names such as Condoleezza Rice (former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser to George W. Bush) and David Patreus (Former U.S. Army General and current Director of the CIA) had been floated in the media as possibilities, along with Tim Pawlenty (former Governor of Minnesota) and Rob Portman (Senator from Ohio). The first two names would have been intriguing choices, suggesting an unusual moderation and creativity on the part of Romney; the latter two, only hints of moderation and even more of the same Romney blandness. Not a particularly surprising choice given the options and constraints, not a game-changer, Ryan will serve Romney’s needs well, if he doesn’t manage to upstage him.

The selection of Paul Ryan should improve the political discourse in the campaign, focus it at the very least. To date, the campaigns and their associated but legally unassociated super-PACs have exchanged mostly ad hominem half-truths and counter-charges that these half-truths are complete and outright lies. A tiresome practice, though effective in increasing both candidate’s overall negatives. The VP selection represents the biggest decision Mitt Romney will have made to date, and this one won’t be a disaster, like John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin. But neither will it advance him significantly with independent voters or with contested regions, other than Wisconsin, Ryan’s home state. Ryan is the chief author of the Republican-dominated House of Representatives’ budget proposal, which cuts deeply into popular social programs—the U.S. version of fiscal austerity now going the rounds in Europe. Bad economic policy in the short term and reminiscent of the economic policies that helped to generate our current predicament in the first place, at least the Ryan budget represents a policy that can be debated in relatively clear, even stark, political and economic language, language that the electorate can come to take sides with.