11 Aug 2012

Not the best of starts for Romney

In every American presidential cycle one of the favourite Washington parlour games centres on the choice of the Vice Presidential candidate. After weeks of nose haired tingling speculation Mitt Romney, the man who will take on Barack Obama in November, has finally pricked the bubble of suspense.

He has chosen Paul Ryan – a congressman from Wisconsin who has served 14 years on Capitol Hill and is still astonishingly young at 42 years. Ryan is cool, conservative and from the swing state of Wisconsin in the mid west. He shares Mitt Romney perfect hair and chiselled looks but he’s more ideologically conservative and less prone to gaffs. As if on cue – Mitt Romney took the stage and with great fanfare announced the next President of the United States.

After a very pregnant pause, very many red faces and some perspiration from his advisors the man who wants to lead to America climbed back on to the stage and corrected his mistake. Weird doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Ryan is a lot less risky a choice than Sarah Palin was four years ago but because of his trenchant conservative views his radical plans for reforming America’s fiscal house (he wants to dismantle the existing Medicare system) he is a bit of a gamble.

The rank and file of the Republican party will love him, the Obama crowd have already shown that they love to hate him. The battle lines are drawn. The big issue of this election is how to reboot America Inc. Let the games begin.

Vice Presidential candidates, despite the publicity that some of the more recent ones have attracted, do not on the whole win or lose elections for the main nominee.

Arguably the last VP to have delivered victory for his boss was Lyndon Johnson in 1960 without whom Kennedy would not have won Texas and therefore not the White House.

Ryan may also turn out to be largely irrelevant in the battle between Mitt and Barack, however as a popular congressman from Wisconsin a key swing state in the upper mid west which was lost by George Bush in 2004 with only 11,000 votes it is possible that Ryan could swing Wisconsin for Romney and in a tight race every state helps.

One thing is certain – by bringing Ryan on board, Romney has honed his ideological message and has created a very clear division between his vision of reforming America and President Obama’s.

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