ROMNEY HAD THREE OBVIOUS OPTIONS IN CHOOSING A RUNNING MATE. The first was someone who could help make that economic case, someone with executive or managerial experience who would reinforce his greatest strength. The second was someone who could compensate for a glaring weakness—namely, the lack of enthusiasm in the conservative base, as John McCain had done with Sarah Palin four years prior. The third was someone who could help politically, ideally someone so popular in a swing state that his presence on the ticket could carry it come November.
There was no shortage of choices. Romney could select a successful governor, such as Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal or New Jersey’s Chris Christie or Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty. He could pick a Tea Party star, such as Marco Rubio. He could choose a geographic complement, such as Ohio’s Rob Portman or Virginia’s Bob McDonnell.
One name that nobody outside Romney’s inner circle took seriously: Paul Ryan.
The congressional GOP was dysfunctional, and Ryan had emerged as perhaps its most polarizing figure. His safety net–slashing budgets were widely viewed as politically toxic: Democrats ran ads depicting Ryan pushing a wheelchair-bound grandmother off a cliff, and Newt Gingrich described the Wisconsin congressman’s proposal as “right-wing social engineering.”11
Furthermore, Ryan had found religion on deficits only once George W. Bush left office, having voted for two wars, enormous tax cuts, and the massive Medicare prescription drug program. Romney had enough problems of his own; why adopt someone else’s baggage?
This was the position taken by Stu Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist and closest adviser. Determined to make the election a “referendum” on Obama—that is, forcing voters to view their decision through the narrowest possible context of the president’s job performance—Stevens was not welcoming of distractions. Anything the GOP did to divert attention away from a limping economy, Stevens told Romney, was a boon to Obama’s reelection.
The president wanted a “choice” election, one in which voters judged the incumbent not in isolation, but against the alternative. In this case, that meant framing Obama, the pragmatic protector of the American worker he identified with, against Romney, the ruthless fix-it man who worked off formulas instead of feelings. The problem for Stevens, and for the GOP writ large, was that Romney wanted both a referendum and a choice—hence his pick of Ryan.
In truth, Romney never valued a running mate who offered political expediency; he made it known to friends and senior aides that he wanted his selection to signal an emphasis on governing. This was hard to believe given Romney’s cautious reputation, but in fact, the Republican nominee had told confidants that he was prepared to be unpopular for the first two years of his presidency because of the cuts he hoped to make—cuts that Ryan, as his junior partner, could help design and pass into law. Obama could barely believe his luck. Ryan, the poster child for policies made synonymous with social Darwinism, was joining the GOP ticket.
When Romney introduced his running mate, on August 11 aboard the retired USS Wisconsin in Southern Virginia, he hailed Ryan as “an intellectual leader of the Republican Party” who had been prescient in warning of “the fiscal catastrophe that awaits us if we don’t change course.” Ryan, who could pass for one of Romney’s five sons, came bounding down from the ship wearing a sport coat with no tie.
“President Obama, and too many like him in Washington, have refused to make difficult decisions because they are more worried about their next election than they are about the next generation,” Ryan said. “Politicians from both parties have made empty promises which will soon become broken promises—with painful consequences—if we fail to act now.”
Although Romney had been pouring time and money into diversifying states such as Virginia and Colorado, the investment was showing little return. In fact, as the campaign progressed, it was becoming apparent that Romney’s best chance to beat Obama would be in the Rust Belt, where the president’s approval among working-class whites had plateaued over the last several years. Wisconsin was part of the “Blue Wall” of states Democrats had carried in every presidential election since 1992. Romney hoped that Ryan, with his Irish-Catholic roots and midwestern twang, could help put not just his home state into play but Michigan and Pennsylvania as well.
It was an exercise in obliviousness: Romney was confident that certain voters, in a certain part of the country, would respond to a running mate whose governing vision—entitlement cuts, immigration reform, and unfettered free trade—was exactly what they did not want.
ROMNEY ALWAYS STRUGGLED TO SELL HIS STRENGTHS. HE WAS A COMPETENT, technocrat-minded governor, but he appeared reticent in hyping his record. Reforming the Massachusetts health care system had been a crowning achievement, but he avoided the issue because of the fury over Obamacare. His activity in the LDS church included countless stories of his service to the poor and destitute, but he was hesitant to discuss religion.
This was precisely what Stevens envisioned. The election should be a referendum on Obama. Romney wasn’t going to win a likeability contest against the president; his advisers wanted a Monster.com election, not a Match.com election. Whenever he saw ads run by the outside super PAC supporting Romney that attempted to humanize him (with stories of how he’d once shut down his business to conduct a search for a missing teenage girl, for instance), Stevens would scream at the television, “Why are you wasting money on this shit?!”
Romney grew more assertive speaking to these themes as the race went on: how he governed pragmatically in a blue state, how he understood the complexities of the health care marketplace, how he served the underprivileged as an elder in his church.
Tellingly, these testimonials had something of an inverse effect on diverging portions of the electorate: It attracted some persuadable voters in the middle, but it did nothing to energize conservatives. Meanwhile, the one trait universally assumed to help Romney connect with the base, his business chops, might have alienated him from it. Pie charts and economic models do little to assuage voter angst. As people watched their jobs disappearing, their communities hollowing out, and their national character changing, they wanted a brawler—not a bookkeeper.
“It became a Wall Street Journal campaign,” Cantor recalls. “There were rallies in these big airport hangers in rural areas, and he’s talking about unfunded liabilities and the entitlement programs and GDP percentage. I mean, it was like a graduate economics class. And it struck me that something was just not clicking. There’s no way all these thousands of people that showed up really want to hear this.”
What they wanted to hear, many of them, was an echo of their own contempt for Obama.
Four years had provided plenty of ammunition. The president’s about-face on gay marriage. His administration’s feud with religious groups over contraception and the ensuing talk of a Republican “war on women.” His so-called apology tour, in which he traveled the world confessing of America’s past arrogance. All of it felt patronizing, disdainful.
But more than anything, it was Obama’s perceived exploitation of racially driven identity politics that drove Republicans crazy. Whether it was his election-year legalization of undocumented minors, or his scolding of a Massachusetts police officer for his arrest of a black Harvard professor, or his emotional observation that a murdered black teenager, Trayvon Martin, could pass for his own son, the nation’s first black president goaded conservatives in ways that no white Democrat possibly could.