That’s my point. He didn’t have much experience, so he chose a longstanding Senator as his running mate. Ditto with Bush II, he was relatively inexperienced, so chose Cheney, who’d been in gov’t in one form or another since the dawn of time. And both men successfully made it to the White House. Romney will do the same.
Only 42 other people in the history of the world can claim the same job Obama currently holds on their resume; only 35 of those held the job longer than he has. I’d say he’s more experienced by miles than any Republican mentioned in this thread as a potential presidential or vice-presidential nominee.
If Romney and whatever sacrificial lamb he chooses to run with tries to claim they’re more experienced at running the country than the current president, they’ll be laughed into the funny papers.
You must not be reading “Republican Goal Post Moving Tips”: now experience in the federal government is BAD. The truly important qualification now is private industy experience (of which, you’ll recall, John McCain had zero, which-- lucky for him!–wasn’t so important in 2008.)
Except that the Republicans don’t want to draw too much attention to Romney’s private industry experience, either, because that invites attacks on just what his private industry experience consisted of.
George H.W. Bush.
Read my lips, you heard it here first.
You forgot the smiley.
As for Rubio, I think he’s gone far enough in denying now as to be more or less ineligible. Once, maybe twice, and you can reverse yourself: a dozen times (or more)? Nope. Plus he’s too smart to want any part of this particular race. Now, 2016? Maybe. But by then he’ll be running for the grand prize, not the “Warm Spit” Cup.
Rubio looks great on paper, but he pissed off the Florida Cubans by claiming his parents fled Castro when they really came three years before, and Floridians in general are feeling some buyer’s remorse over electing Rick Scott, so the idea that he will deliver Florida for the GOP is far from a lock.
And from his perspective, I don’t think anyone has more to lose from being on the ticket than Rubio. He’s only 40 years old; the odds are very good that a good time will come around for him the way 2008 was perfect for Obama. It might have been his time if the Tea Party’s moment hadn’t passed so quickly after the 2010 elections, but it did. Running with Romney this time is probably just bathing himself in Eau de Loser, and that shit doesn’t wash off.
The same goes for Paul Ryan. Even if Romney wants him–and I don’t think he will–he has to know it’s not his time.
Nikki Haley looks good on paper, since Romney is so unrelentingly white and the ticket could use some color, and she managed to win over South Carolina despite being brown. But she doesn’t bring anything politically–SC is already in the bag, and Indian-Americans just aren’t an important voting bloc. And the Palin comparisons are too easy.
In fact, I’d wager that Sarah Palin has plowed salt into the fields for women as GOP VP candidates for at least another decade. Sorry, Susana Martinez.
I think Romney’s VP candidate has to be a beyond-reproach evangelical Christian to balance out his Mormon thing. I think he’d even be pushing it with a Catholic (even though evangelicals are flocking to the Catholic Rick Santorum). So Bob McDonnell would have been great if he hadn’t shown his ass over the whole ultrasound bill. He’d still mobilize some evangelicals, but he’d also mobilize a lot of reluctant liberals to get out and vote Obama.
Christie’s conservative bona fides are just not strong enough. That’s the last thing Romney needs.
Out of their >8% group, I’d have to go with Rob Portman.
I think that’s exactly what the Joe Biden and Al Gore picks were.
I think the nominee will want bland and inoffensive. The GOP tried a splash of color last time around and it failed miserably. Someone like a Rob Portman, who’s so invisible in his home state (Ohio) that something like 40% of voters have no opinion of him (I think it was PPP that measured that, saying that it was the highest amount of apathy they’d ever recorded for a sitting senator). Assuming it’s Romney, anybody really great might just end up casting him in an even more mediocre light.
But he’s already got that in spades! You don’t think he’ll go for a little ‘balance’ on his ticket?
I’d disagree with the notion that Eau de Loser doesn’t wear off of the #2 guy on the ticket. I’d have to argue that being the running mate of a losing candidate was, on balance, a help to the political fortunes of Muskie (1968), Dole (1976), Lieberman (2000), Edwards (2004), and Palin (2008). That none of these candidates ever won the Presidency, ISTM, has more to do with their individual limitations or (in Dole’s case especially) the circumstances of the times, but being #2 on the losing ticket didn’t hurt them.
You could even add Quayle and Mondale to the list, but they were on winning tickets (and served as veep for a term each) before they were #2 on losing tickets, so it’s hard to separate out the different effects.
The problem this time might be more Eau de Romney than Eau de Loser. Not only is he likely to lose, but he’s not exactly beloved even among Republicans.
Somebody (Steve Benen, maybe?) recently characterized running mates as Augusts, Novembers, and Januarys. That is, they’ve been chosen to either mend an intraparty rift to unify the party at the convention, or been chosen to aid the candidate’s chances of winning in November, or to aid in governing. A veep candidate can be more than one of these, but rarely all three.
Palin was the ultimate August; Cheney and Biden the ultimate Januarys. Gore was mostly a January but a bit of November too.
I think it will be someone who’s barely known at all – another Palin type, but vetted more carefully so as not to turn out to be an embarrassment.
The reason is that, aside from Romney (whose turn it is to run), virtually all the serious and smart potential presidential candidate stayed away from the 2012 race like it was the plague. Why? Because they understand that Obama is going to win, and they didn’t and still don’t want to be cast into the role of loser. That’s why we had the Republican Clown Car candidates that we had.
It’s essentially the same for the VP. The serious players will dodge it. A relative unknown will have nothing to lose, and won’t dodge it.
I wouldn’t rule out Portman. He is widely respected by the Beltway establishment but AFAIK isn’t disliked by the base. He might deliver Ohio and that is probably the most important state. Picking him will help re-position Romney without going down the dreaded Etch-a-Sketch path of shifting positions.
I don’t think Romney will use a VP pick to please the base. That would be playing it safe and he won’t win this year by doing that. He needs to take a calculated risk that the base is determined to defeat Obama anyway and pick someone who will appeal to independents.
The problem for Romney is that if he wants much of a grassroots organization that can keep tabs on potential Republican voters and do GOTV in November, he needs to not just not offend the base: he needs to give them a reason to volunteer for the campaign.
His veep nomination is really his only shot at that. If he doesn’t nominate someone who the tea partiers regard as one of them, he’s basically conceding the election unless the economy goes south in a bigger way than just the March numbers would indicate.
I’d be perfectly happy if he nominated a Portman or a Pawlenty or a Thune. But that’s why I don’t expect it.
Runing-mate T.R. overshadowed nominee McKinley on the GOP ticket in 1896; never again.
If he chooses the VP to please his base how does he woo independents? By shifting positions and getting accused of etch-a-sketching? Plus I think the base is energized enough by the prospect of beating Obama. So long as Romney doesn’t gratuitously alienate them, I think he has some freedom of movement.
I think the fundamentals of the race point to a 4-5 point Obama advantage. It’s Romney who needs to figure out how to shake things up and he needs to take calculated risks. I think Portman could be exactly that type of risk. He will fundamentally re-position his candidacy and get a wave of positive Beltway media attention. Moderates will look at him again in a fresh way.
Having said all this I wouldn’t rule out Rubio either. Perhaps he is a talented enough politician to excite the base and woo independents. However he is very young and who knows how well he will play on the big stage. Rick Perry also looked awfully good on paper to get the Republican nomination.
Marco Rubio seems to be an excellent choice-the Tea Party supports him but he doesn’t alienate moderates either. The only problem may be that some cretins will oppose him because he isn’t a “natural-born citizen” as his parents weren’t citizens when Rubio was born.
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It’ll be a WASP for sure. He doesn’t need anyone from a red state, they would crawl over broken glass in the nude to vote against Obama. Tim Pawlenty fits the bill, and Pawlenty surely had the veep spot in mind when he whiffed on the softball setup in that debate. Plus Pawlenty has the advantage of making Romney seem charismatic by comparison, a remarkable feat indeed.
Bentsen overshadowed Dukakis quite a bit in 1988. Some pundits went so far as to suggest, only half-jokingly, that the two should switch places on the ticket.