Romney and Ryan: Can money buy any office?

Who would Romney choose as his running mate? It was the question observers of the American political scene had been asking ever since Willard Mitt Romney became the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States.

Would he follow the 2008 Republican precedent in selecting a risky potential game-changer, or would he instead plump for a safe, established, mainstream choice?

Well, what would be the rational decision? That depends on whether you think you’re heading for the rocks or whether you believe you’re set fair if you just don’t rock the boat. In the first instance, a safe but unexciting choice might mean losing by less. In Presidential politics, however, there are no prizes for limiting the size of the loss. There is no such thing as keeping the deficit to manageable proportions. If you lose by one electoral vote, you may as well lose by a hundred. Put another way, in a state of the world where you are likely to go down by three or four points, volatility is very much your friend. It’s a state of the world where it’s rational to shake the dice. And for Governor Romney, it’s a state of the world which he currently inhabits. This is reflected in the betting markets which overall give him barely a one in three chance of taking the White House, and most sophisticated forecasting models, which tend to rate his probability of evicting President Obama even lower.

The problem for Romney, however, is that most of the dice he has to play with are loaded against him. All potential game-changers those with the purse-strings would allow him to select from are fraught with huge downside risk. And money has never mattered so much since the 5-4 decision of the US Supreme Court to allow so-called super PACs to allow billionaires and corporations to spend unlimited sums of money helping or hindering individual candidates, to the massive advantage of the Republican Party in general, and Mr Romney in particular.

Yet he is himself a very cautious politician by nature who would never have made John McCain’s mistake of choosing a maverick running mate with the potential to run out of control. For that reason, he was always likely to plead with his backers to be allowed a known quantity, unlikely to create any mayhem. That pretty much ruled out Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, but just about pulls in Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the darling of Fox News, the effective broadcasting arm of the Republican Party.

So what is the downside risk with Mr Ryan?

It’s not difficult to state. He is simply the architect in chief of RyanCare, which is pretty much the idea that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security should be slashed to the core to save money, which can be used instead to cut taxes on the richest in the country. It’s a policy which all the polling shows is overwhelmingly unpopular, and the more that people understand it, the less they like it. By raising Mr Ryan to the national stage, the presumptive Republican nominee has just ensured that RyanCare will be all too well understood by the American people by the time of the election.

More generally, various statistical measures (such as the well-recognised statistical system DW-Nominate) peg him as way to the right of even Dick Cheney and certainly the most conservative Republican member of Congress to be picked for the vice-presidential slot since at least 1900. He is also ranked as more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the centre of the political spectrum.

So can Mr Ryan help win his home state of Wisconsin? That’s not impossible, but his net favourable rating in his home state is, according to the polling, just five points.

So what does he add?

He adds money, lots of it, from those with most to gain from RyanCare. And he adds spice to the Fox News cheerleading bandwagon. These are factors not to be under-estimated. Without them, Romney would be already sunk with no hope of re-surfacing.

It is probably a chance that Mitt Romney thinks worth taking, the best among the limited choices his backers would allow him. With hindsight, it was a choice which became almost inevitable as soon as the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to allow unlimited flows of money to the political stage.

Is it a strategy that will work? Can money buy any office, even the highest elected office of all? In November, we shall know the answer to that question.

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• robobbob

  I disagree with the idea that corporations are people. But that is an argument created centuries ago in the world of finance.
  that said, the massive floodgates of money the author repeatedly relates to are still less than what labor unions spend each election, and have spent for the last several decades.

• Aliend

  Money has bought the presidency & always will. I don’t see americans learning from their mistakes, & neither have the wealthy & the corporations who are donating money to the republicans so they don’t pay more taxes. In the end, you have China with better transport system than the US, whose infrastructure is ailing & in need of replacement.
  Obama even quoted that Singapore has better airports than the US has. All because of a stupid needless war which most americans supported while the rich evading taxes & continue to evade paying it.

• ThomasPaineRN

  A grossly distorted article, full of political spin.

  Addressing just one point, lest this comment become a full rebuttal
  article, Ryan’s plan for medicare and social security contains
  absolutely no changes, zero, zilch, nada, for those 55 and older. Those
  of us 55 and younger will endure modifications designed to keep the damn
  thing from going bankrupt and going away altogether.

  No one has suggested “slashing to the core,” especially not “to cut
  taxes on the richest.” What is suggested is no changes for those about
  to retire, but reasonable modifications for those of us still paying
  into the system to ensure there are actually benefits when we get to
  retirement.

  The system is unsustainable as is. It was created when very few people
  lived past 65. We live a lot longer than that now, medical care costs a
  lot more now, and the design of the system is outdated and totally
  unsustainable. Any rudimentary understanding of actuarial tables will
  reveal the fatal flaws.

  Ryan’s plan does not eliminate the benefit, it attempts to keep it alive. Any other accusation is simply political bs.