A vice presidential nominee’s rollout can be as important as the nominee himself, and I was struck in particular by something I heard on CNN just minutes before Paul Ryan stepped to the microphone on the U.S.S. Wisconsin to give his speech this morning.
According to CNN, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney was saying that Romney had actually decided on Ryan nearly two weeks ago, on August 1st. Here’s why that’s such an interesting detail for the Romney folks to put out:
Over the last eight days or so, there was a rapidly growing drumroll of appeals from prominent conservatives that Romney go bold with his veep choice; that he stand tall with conservative ideals; that he consider . . . Ryan.
The Weekly Standard urged this. The Wall Street Journal urged this. There was so much urging from so many quarters that whole news stories were written about the urging and the bind in which it put Romney. The story in The Times late this week was headlined, “Romney Faces Pressure from Right to Put Ryan on Ticket.”
Regarding that pressure, there’s already political commentary calling Romney an easily bullied coward whose selection of Ryan is a capitulation to the demands of the right.
So when a Romney adviser volunteers the detail that Ryan was the pick before the drumroll and before all that florid urging, the adviser is both reactively and prophylactically trying to portray Romney as his own man, fully in charge of his own decisions and poised to make an audacious one even before other Republicans clamored for it.
The rollout of a running mate is also a refinement of the presidential nominee. As we hear a great deal about Ryan, we’re going to hear almost as much about what he supposedly says about Romney.
We’re going to hear that Romney goes with his gut and goes bold. And we’re going to hear that because those qualities haven’t, until now, been widely attributed to Romney; because those qualities could go a long way toward improving Romney’s shaky favorable-unfavorable ratings; because those qualities could make voters feel a bit better about him than they do.
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And the rollout of Ryan will emphasize assets of his that ideally temper Romney’s liabilities or shore up his weak spots or bring to the ticket bits of biography and background that Romney can’t provide.
Ryan will be put forward as someone with a readier, easier connection to middle-class Americans and to Americans who have struggled than Romney can muster. Note that in introducing Ryan this morning, Romney mentioned that “Paul’s father died when he was in high school.” Romney also said that Ryan “internalized the virtues and the hard-working ethic of the Midwest.”
Note as well that Romney, who is Mormon, highlighted Ryan’s religion, saying: “A faithful Catholic, Paul believes in the worth and dignity of every human life.”
In the days to come, at the engineering of the Romney campaign, we’ll hear about Paul Ryan who drives a truck, Paul Ryan who listens to the rock band AC/DC, Paul Ryan who hunts deer with a bow, Paul Ryan who butchers that quarry and makes venison sausage with his own bloodied hands. Romney’s aides know that Romney, like it or not, comes across as a patrician. So they’ll work overtime to make certain that Ryan is presented as a populist.
When Ryan stepped to the microphone this morning, I was struck as never before by how really young he can seem, perhaps because he was stepping into a whole new context, that of someone who could end up, as the saying goes, a heartbeat away from the presidency. His voice has a bit of a squeak in it. A cowlick on the back of his head won’t be tamed.
Is he ready for this? Although he has been the object of journalistic fascination for some time now, he’s about to face a whole new kind of scrutiny, and stumping coast to coast in the heat of a bitterly contested presidential campaign is a challenge for which no prior experience can fully prepare a person. He’ll either be suited to it or not. It’s anyone’s guess—and it’s Romney’s gamble.
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