It's almost time in the Watergate blogging to get to the smoking gun tape; I did an item about it over at PP today.
And at Greg's place, I posted about the Montana Republican Senate candidate who is running ads against the Ryan budget. I do think that Mitt Romney is a bit vulnerable on this one; I'm guessing, from how GOP Senate candidates are dealing with it, that the Ryan budget polls badly. But Romney is stuck with it, and he's going to (continue to) get attacked on it. Of course, as always these things have to be placed in context..it's not going to cost Romney 5 points, or anything like that. But could it hurt a bit? Yeah, I think so. I'll say one thing: it would really be nuts of Romney to put Ryan on the ticket, and I'll be shocked if he does it.
saw your headline on my blogroll and thought you were mocking people for "smoking Ryan" - dreaming he'd be veep.
ReplyDeleteStory today is that Ryan is being seriously vetted.
ReplyDeleteWhether that means Romney's camp is paying fealty, doing due diligence on the whole list, or actually considering Ryan is anyone's guess.
Personally, especially given the 2008 fiasco, I think it'd be foolish not to vet a large list. You tell every faction in the party you like them AND you're prepared in case some factions veto choices (Ridge/Lieberman) or your choice gets caught in bed with a live boy/dead girl between when you've made up your mind and when you announce that you've made up your mind.
I am a strong economic conservative and a staunch Republican (member of the Republican County Committee here in Monmouth County, NJ), and even I think the Ryan budget is a bridge too far for electoral politics. The best means of holding down the size of the federal government is to defeat new spending programs and hold existing programs' appropriation increses down to the rate of inflation plus population growth. In the long run, that gradually shrinks government as a fraction of the GDP without alarming beneficiaries of existing programs. If the Ryan budget was actually implemented, older white voters (the core of the Republican base) would turn against the Republican Party in substantial numbers.
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