Mitt Romney Finds Love in the GOP
Jules Witcover

In picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney has finally found a way to get the Republican Party to love him. Now all he has to do is find acceptance in the rest of the country.

His choice of Ryan assured in one stroke that the rebellious tea party movement would fall in line behind the ticket. And it was persuasive evidence for many other Republicans who had doubted Romney's fealty to the Grand Old Party as currently constituted.

At the same time, he faces the likely problem that the tail of the dog -- Ryan's plan attacking the safety net for poor and middle-class Americans -- may wag the Romney-Ryan campaign from now until election day.

President Obama's campaign and his freewheeling super PAC allies have already targeted Ryan's scheme to shift Medicare benefits to a voucher system through the states as the end of the program "as we know it." Florida seniors in particular face an avalanche of scare advertising on that theme in the months ahead.

Ryan's assurance that current Medicare recipients will not be affected is not likely to mollify them, as millions of them cling to the safety net in these days of broad economic distress. Nor will fears that Social Security will be next on the Ryan chopping block, fears surely to be fanned by the Democrats.

Romney's endorsement of the Ryan plan also promising deep debt reduction will make it difficult for him to insist he has his own plan to slay the entitlement and deficit dragons. The last thing he will want to do is point out any differences and detour the campaign debate from focusing on Obama's first-term economic record.

In a sense, the choice of Ryan finally accomplishes what Romney on his own struggled and failed to achieve in his long and debilitating fight for the Republican nomination. Had he been able to win the hearts of fellow Republicans along with their convention votes in the spring, he would have been freer to choose a running mate with greater appeal outside the tea-party-infiltrated GOP family.

Now Romney and his strategists must concentrate on arousing the drowsy elements in that family to an uncommon turnout in the fall, while also trying to convince independents and discontented conservative Democrats of a brighter economic future under the Republican nominees.

It's rare that a vice-presidential nominee attracts such heavy attention in at least the early phase of the campaign. The first such nominee to do so was Republican presidential nominee William McKinley's running mate, Gov. Theodore Roosevelt of New York, in 1900.

Roosevelt was so disliked and feared by McKinley's campaign manager, Mark Hanna, that Hanna ruefully told McKinley: "Now it's up to you to live." When, after their election, McKinley was assassinated, Hanna was crestfallen, and not only over the death of his friend the president.

In 1944, a revolt of a handful of Democratic big-city politicians persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to drop his somewhat quirky vice president, Henry Wallace, from his ticket in favor of Harry Truman. But the choice had no influence on the election, nor on FDR's administration thereafter for that matter, until his sudden death in 1945 with America still at war.

The only fairly recent running mate who might have had a positive impact on an election was Lyndon Johnson in 1960, whose campaigning in Texas and the South was credited with helping achieve John F. Kennedy's narrow victory over Richard Nixon. However, LBJ's efforts were a mere sideshow to JFK's own youth-oriented pitch to "get America moving again." More recently, there was the shock of John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin in 2008, which in the end couldn't save his campaign.

So if the immediate focus on Paul Ryan and his strong medicine for economic recovery continues to be a dominant campaign theme through Election Day, it will be a rare occurrence. For the time being, it will keep Romney's campaign on the defensive unless he himself can convey more conviction that his own ideas are the path out of the woes that have complicated Obama's bid for re-election.

 

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Mitt Romney Finds Love in the GOP | Politics

 

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