Sarah Palin may have done wonders for Tina Fey, MSNBC’s ratings and the reality-television industry in general, but she’s made this year’s Republican veepstakes vastly less interesting to handicap. The fear of repeating a Palin-style choice, a gamble that worked out badly for both members of 2008’s Republican ticket, has dramatically shortened the plausible list of Mitt Romney’s running mates.
It is highly unlikely, for instance, that the presumptive Republican nominee will select either of his party’s most promising female officeholders, New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, because both have less than two years of political experience in statewide office, and the parallels with the Palin pick would probably dominate the news coverage at the outset.
It’s also unlikely that Romney will go with Marco Rubio of Florida, darling of the right and Great Hispanic Hope though he may be, because of basically similar considerations. Rubio is light on experience and relatively new to the national stage, and even though the various controversies in his past – over his credit card expenditures as a Florida officeholder, over the way his Web site described his parent’s departure from Cuba, over his friendship with a Florida congressman who’s been investigated by the I.R.S. – mostly look like pseudoscandals, there are enough of them to spook a campaign wary of a replay of the McCain campaign’s Troopergate headaches.
The memory of the way Palin’s star tended to eclipse McCain’s even when she wasn’t “going rogue,” meanwhile, has probably reduced Romney’s appetite for picking a mercurial, celebrity-like figure. Hence the long odds against New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who might otherwise have been an obvious pick, and the even longer odds against the perpetually underestimated (though not, one assumes, by veterans of Romney’s 2008 campaign) Mike Huckabee, who might otherwise have been an interesting dark horse choice.
Scratch off all of these names, as well as implausible alleged contenders like Condoleezza Rice (whose selection would inspire two months of arguments about abortion and Bush-era foreign policy), and you’re left with the conventional wisdom, which has persuasively narrowed the field to four names: the former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Ohio Senator Rob Portman, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
Of these four, Pawlenty and Portman are the cautious-to-boring choices, Ryan and Jindal the younger, nerdier, riskier ones. But Ryan is probably a uniquely risky choice, because he embodies the Republican Party’s commitment to entitlement reform, and that’s a commitment that the Obama campaign will presumably be highlighting at every opportunity all fall.
There is a case to be made that this is a risk worth taking, since Romney is going to be attacked on Medicare no matter what, and Ryan is a uniquely fluent advocate for the conservative position. But everything we’ve seen from the Romney campaign suggests that they’re very leery of saying or doing anything that might help make Obama’s arguments for him or complicate their own near-obsessive focus on the economy. So it’s reasonable to bet against Ryan on those grounds.
If Ryan is too closely associated with specific Obama-era arguments to be the favorite, Tim Pawlenty is probably too closely associated with his own once highly touted presidential campaign. The Minnesotan was supposed to give Romney his strongest challenge, but his bid looked stylistically lame and substantively lackluster even before Pawlenty famously backed down from a debate-stage confrontation with Romney himself.
The best case for Pawlenty is that he would bring a common touch and a populist style to a candidacy that currently lacks both. But that case was fatally undermined by the Minnesota governor’s performance on the campaign trail last fall. A populist who inspires so little enthusiasm from actual voters that he drops out before the first ballot gets cast probably isn’t the man to improve Mitt Romney’s numbers with blue-collar voters in Ohio and Michigan – and absent that qualification, the argument for picking Pawlenty mostly evaporates.
Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images, Patrick Semansky, via BloombergSenator Rob Portman, Governor Bobby JindalThis leaves Portman and Jindal. Like Ryan, both easily pass the “could he be president” test, with impressive resumes (absurdly impressive, in Jindal’s case: He was running the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals at 24) and instant policy credibility. Like Pawlenty, both have experience running and winning statewide races in places that don’t always elect Republicans.
But there’s no question that an earnest white Midwestern Methodist like Portman would be the safer choice – so safe, in fact, that he would probably drop out of the headlines the day after he was picked. Jindal, on the other hand, would give the press all kinds of things to fixate on: His youth, his ethnicity, his Ichabod Crane physique, his religious background (he’s a convert from Hinduism to Catholicism) and of course the endless interesting-and-then-some stories that you’ll find percolating in Louisiana politics.
He’s no Palin, in other words, but he is the kind of pick you make if you’re willing to accept a little more risk for the chance of a little more reward. As someone who believes Romney is playing things too cautiously at present, I tend to think he should strongly consider the jolt that choosing Jindal might supply him. But as someone who’s also convinced that the Romney camp is entirely content to just aim for a glide to 51 percent, I tend to think they’ll just play it excruciatingly safe and go with Portman.
And as a journalist who’s desperate for something unexpected to happen in this grim slog of a campaign, I’d be delighted if Romney made my analysis look foolish and showed that he has the capacity to genuinely surprise us.
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