Romney and the Republican Club
Jules Witcover

Groucho Marx was said to have declared that he wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would have him as a member. One wonders whether Mitt Romney may feel deep down the same way about his Republican Party. He has labored all year to convince the party faithful, especially the most conservative among them, that he is really one of them, yet many doubters remain.

That is so even as he has gone all-in on many of their most cherished positions. He joined the GOP chorus against "Obamacare," even though the health-care reform program he enacted as governor of Massachusetts is widely seen as a model for it. When the Supreme Court jolted the faithful by declaring the Obama plan constitutional, Romney loyally joined the lament and the promise of "repeal and replace."

Still, many in the conservative party base are concerned as the Republican National Convention approaches and Romney narrows his list of prospective vice-presidential running mates. They fear he will take the conventional route and select a bland ticket partner who will not make waves -- and not create much excitement either.

The betting increasingly is that, as a man of caution, Romney will choose Sen. Rob Portman of swing-state Ohio, a former George W.Bush budget director, declaring, as all presidential nominees do, that he has picked the best qualified person to be president if fate so determines.

But as selection time draws near, many party conservatives have been pressuring Romney to roll the dice and select the GOP's debt-slashing House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, author of the controversial House plan of deficit reduction and entitlement reform that Senate Democrats won't buy.

Leading pro-Ryan advocates include the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and editor Bill Kristol of the conservative Weekly Standard. Choosing Ryan, they seem to suggest, would assure at Romney and his strategists would make the Wisconsin congressman's plan a centerpiece of the Republican campaign in the fall.

Tapping Ryan as the running mate would obviously please the conservative base, including members of the tea party movement , which has already indicated a willingness to risk losing for the sake of holding to its politically extreme positions. However, to win the election, the Republican nominees must attract voters beyond that base, among moderates and independents.

Those arguing for Ryan see him as a vehicle for injecting the true conservative agenda into the Romney campaign, which seems to them increasingly bland and stagnant as it drifts through a boring summer, interrupted only by a less than helpful trip abroad by its gafffe-prone candidate.

Shifting public-opinion polling numbers, particularly in the swing states, have caused conservative Republicans to fear that Romney may be headed for defeat by depending too much on anti-Obama sentiment to hand him the White House in November. Better to campaign on a genuine conservative agenda and put it to the test, they say, than to run under what Ronald Reagan used to call a banner of pale pastels and lose.

The Democrats, no doubt, would be gleeful to have Ryan on the ticket with Romney. He would make it easier to paint the Republican team as a certain threat to entitlement programs from Social Security and Medicare to a range of other social welfare plans, which remain at the core of Democratic support from lower- and middle-income voters.

Romney choosing Ryan as his running mate would not necessarily seem like the sort of desperate act that John McCain perpetrated four years ago in plucking Sarah Palin from national obscurity in far-off Alaska. His 14 years in Congress and as an important House committee chairman would promise more policy gravitas that Palin ever offered. In a presidential contest that in these difficult times should focus on the state of the economy, another informed voice on the subject, either Portman or Ryan, would be welcomed.

At any rate, in such company Romney himself might be inclined to sharpen his own action plan for recovery, still not clear or persuasive to many voters.

 

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Romney and the Republican Club | Politics

 

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