Romney’s self-inflicted wound

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Oh… shit.

Romney’s Paul Ryan honeymoon is over, says Jon Chait.

Not that there really was one, not with Obama supporters rejoicing over the pick, the media unusually quick to point out Ryan’s massive flaws and the badness of the pick generally.

Not with the pick pushing two key swing states, Florida and Ohio, towards the president.

Not with Ryan’s right-wing ideological extremism now front and center, the election suddenly not so much about the president’s handling of the economy but about Ryan’s budget plan in all its deleterious madness.

Think Romney wishes he could take a mulligan?

I get that he wanted, or rather needed, a game changer, someone other than a boring white guy like Pawlenty or Portman, but wouldn’t Christie or Rubio or Jindal have been a much better pick?

As I wrote after the announcement, the Ryan pick was an act of desperation on Romney’s part. With his poll numbers falling, his campaign flailing about aimlessly, and lying shamelessly instead of having any sort of positive vision to counter the president, and with the Obama campaign’s successful efforts to define Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy out for himself and his class and to identify his business experience and personal finances as strikes against him, it was clear that things weren’t going well for him. Even he must have seen that.

And so he tried to win back conservatives and the media, and to turn the page on all the talk about his tax returns, tax shelters, and vulture capitalism by picking a conservative ideologue and Beltway media darling.

But just days later, where has that gotten him? Even Republicans are concerned:

Away from the cameras, and with all the usual assurances that people aren’t being quoted by name, there is an unmistakable consensus among Republican operatives in Washington: Romney has taken a risk with Ryan that has only a modest chance of going right — and a huge chance of going horribly wrong.

In more than three dozen interviews with Republican strategists and campaign operatives — old hands and rising next-generation conservatives alike — the most common reactions to Ryan ranged from gnawing apprehension to hair-on-fire anger that Romney has practically ceded the election.

That may be taking it a bit too far — it’s still a competitive race that could turn in his favor, not least given ongoing economic uncertainty — but there’s an undeniable sense already that the Ryan pick was a bad one and that Romney has only made his chances worse, that he took a campaign in decline, and something of a joke after his disastrous foreign trip, and, in trying to turn the page by bringing aboard a conservative “ideas” guy, the GOP’s leading wunderkind and de facto leader (given how his plan has become party orthodoxy), and effectively derailed it.

Seems the honeymoon really only exists in Krazy Kristol’s head. Here in the real world, Romney has a lot of work to do to recover from his self-inflicted wounds, the Ryan pick the most damaging one of all.