The next big event of the US presidential election will be Mitt Romney’s announcement of his Vice Presidential nominee. For the past few weeks, the two clear favourites have been Ohio Senator — and Budget Office director under George W Bush — Rob Portman and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Both certainly fit the description of ‘incredibly boring white guy’ that one Republican official said the Romney campaign was looking for.
But in the last couple of days, Romney has come under increasing pressure from the Right to pick Paul Ryan: a white guy, yes, but not so boring. When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January 2011, Ryan became chair of the Budget Committee — giving him responsibility for the GOP’s alternatives to Obama’s budget proposals. He’s consistently called for big cuts in health and social security spending, warning that otherwise the US faces a debt crisis. In 2011, for example, he made a video claiming that:
‘I asked the Congressional Budget Office to model the economy going forward. So they had these computer programs that simulate the U.S. economy. The computer program crashes in 2037, because it can’t conceive of any way in which the U.S. economy can continue because of this massive burden of debt.’
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial under the headline ‘Why Not Paul Ryan?’, which made the case for Romney to pick the Congressman from Wisconsin: ‘The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election. More than any other politician, the House Budget Chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group dominated decline… As important, Mr. Ryan can make his case in a reasonable and unthreatening way. He doesn’t get mad, or at least he doesn’t show it. Like Reagan, he has a basic cheerfulness and Midwestern equanimity.’ And last night, Newt Gingrich agreed that Ryan would be a good pick, praising ‘his brilliance and the work he’s done on the budget’. That marks a significant turnaround for Gingrich, who last year criticised Ryan’s plan to reform medicare, saying ‘I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social-engineering.’ Notably, the former Speaker of the House also named Portman as his other frontrunner for the VP slot, and added that ‘you can’t forget’ Florida Senator Marco Rubio or Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell — but made no mention of Pawlenty. Of course, all this is just speculation — and so it’ll remain until Romney makes his announcement. After all, as RealClearPolitics’ Scott Conroy pointed out, in 2008 everyone said John McCain would be picking one of Romney, Pawlenty or Joe Lieberman before he shocked us all be selecting Sarah Palin. Nevertheless, a lot of bettors are buying into this Ryan talk: over the past two days his odds have tumbled and he’s surged into the second favourite slot (just behind Portman) on Intrade.
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