Rubber-Stamp Romney

I spent the day out at a volunteering gig. I have not had the time to read any commentary on Mittens' selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate. So what follows is my thinking.

First off, if there was ever a signal that Romney is a weak candidate, this was it. Classic politics is that a candidate plays to the base until the nomination is secured and then pivots towards the center to try and win the moderate/swing voters. Romney, who has spent the last year telling anyone who would listen that he is "a severe conservative" (and persuading hardly anyone), moved even more to the right to pick Paul. This choice signals that Romney had to do more to try to secure his base, that even though he had won enough delegates to win the nomination, he hadn't closed the deal.

Second, Paul handcuffs Romney to the Right. Romney can't swing to the center with Paul cementing him in place.

Third, if anyone thought that Mittens could not have picked a running mate worse than the choice made by Grampaw McCain, they were proven wrong. The Obama campaign is going to hang Ryan's wingnutty policies around Romney's neck like a rotting albatross. If you thought that Romney's tax policies were a reverse Robin Hood, Ryan is that on steroids. As far as tax polices go, Ryan would string up the poor and the middle class by their heels and slit their throats so that the Koch Brothers and the Walton Clan can bathe in the warm blood of the wage-earning taxpayers.

Fourth, the far-Right has been clear that they expect a President Romney to function as a rubber stamp to whatever legislation they can get through Congress. They expect a President Romney to sleep to eight, walk into the Oval Office at ten, spend thirty minutes signing legislation passed by the Chamber of Commerce Congress, and then knock off for the rest of the day to go play with his dancing horses. They expect a President Romney to make Dubya look like a workaholic. And by picking Ryan, Romney has signaled that he is OK with being an autopen for the GOP.

What I feared was that Romney would find a slightly more moderate Republican, maybe even one of the turncoat blue-dog Democrats to run with him and that his operatives would have been out spreading the word among the conservatives: "whaddya going to do, it's either Romney or that nigger Obama gets another term." That might have sucked enough swing voters to Romney to come close or even win.

That's not going to happen now. If anything, the left wing of the Democratic party, which has been pretty upset by the fact that Obama's policies could well have originated from the George H.W. Bush Administration, are going to jump off the fence, open up their pockets and go to work to re-elect him. With a center-right Romney, they might have thought "ecch, what's the difference" and maybe gone through the motions.

Romney may have thought that he energized his base. But he has also energized Obama's base and given moderates a good reason to vote for Obama. Romney's path to power was looking harder each day as his negatives were climbing. He's now, in my estimation, about to go marching off the electoral cliff.

Lord knows that I've not been overly thrilled with Obama's presidency. But I don't see that I have a choice, now.