A Risky Rationale Behind Romney’s Choice of Ryan

Nate Silver who is a polling and statistics wonk has a piece in the New York Times that continues some of the narrative that was contained in my post last night on Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate:  Romney made the pick because he believes that he is losing the campaign and that he has to do something big to avoid defeat in November.  Time will be the ultimate judge, but I feel at this point in time he made the wrong pick.  The silver lining is that with Ryan, the far right gets one of it's darlings on the ticket and if the GOP loses, it is going to be far more difficult to claim that the results were not a clear rejection of the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda and absolutely compassion free social policy approach -  an approach that is the antithesis of the Christianity that the GOP pretends to worship.  I sincerely hope Romney-Ryan goes down to defeat and take the Tea Party and the Christofascists with them.  Here are some excerpts from Nate's column:

When is it rational to take a big risk?   When the status quo isn’t proceeding in a way that you feel is favorable. When you have less to lose. When you need — pardon the cliché, but it’s appropriate here — a “game change.”

When a prudent candidate like Mitt Romney picks someone like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama. The theme that Mr. Romney’s campaign has emphasized for months and months — that the president has failed as an economic leader — may have persuaded 47 or 48 or 49 percent of voters to back him, he seems to have concluded. But not 50.1 percent of them, and not enough for Mr. Romney to secure 270 electoral votes.

The forecast model I developed for FiveThirtyEight, which accounts for state and national polls and the condition of the economy but not other factors, estimated as of Friday that Mr. Obama was about a 70 percent favorite to win re-election. Betting markets and bookmakers have been slightly more equivocal, but have also had Mr. Obama ahead, generally giving him between a 60 and a 65 percent chance of winning a second term.

Why am I concluding that Mr. Romney would have chosen Mr. Ryan only if he felt he was losing? Because from a Politics 101 point of view, this isn’t the most natural choice.

Vice-presidential choices are inherently risky to a degree, but the risks are asymmetric, and weighted toward the downside: It’s far easier to name choices who undermined campaigns than those who helped them. The best way to mitigate that downside risk is to select someone who has been tested on a national stage before, ideally by having run for president themselves — or failing that, by having been elected multiple times from a large and diverse state.

Members of the House of Representatives have only occasionally been selected as running mates. The last one on a winning ticket was John Nance Garner, the speaker of the House, in 1932. The last time an ordinary member of the House was elected vice president, and the last Republican, was more than 100 years ago: in 1908 .   .   .   .   .

Politics 101 suggests that you play toward the center of the electorate. Although this rule has more frequently been violated when it comes to vice-presidential picks, there is evidence that presidential candidates who have more “extreme” ideologies (closer to the left wing or the right wing than the electoral center) underperform relative to the economic fundamentals.

Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

Mr. Ryan is the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900. He is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center. 

Mr. Ryan’s controversial budget, which polls poorly, will obviously get much more attention than it had previously. The fate of the presidential race and the fate of Congressional races may become more closely tied together. Mr. Obama will no longer have to stretch to evoke the specter of Congress and its 15 percent approval rating. With Mr. Ryan on the opposing ticket, he will be running against a flesh-and-blood embodiment of it.

Taking risks like these is not what you do if you think you have a winning hand already. But Mr. Romney, the turnaround artist, decided that he needed to turn around his own campaign.

I view the GOP in its current incarnation as something dangerous and borderline evil: fiscally reckless despite claims to the contrary; contemptuous of the civil liberties of minorities, if not openly racists; and devoid of any compassion for the less fortunate.  Hence the plain to tax the poor and middle class in order to give huge tax breaks by the standards of average Americans to the already obscenely wealthy.