"The Ryan pick is, of course, lunacy." - "A Romney loss would have led to the nomination of a Neanderthal in 2016, like Rick Santorum" - "Post-Ryan, a Romney loss will be read as a Goldwater-esque act of ideological self-immolation" - Romney is a non-macho Wimp !

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The New Republic : Noam Scheiber : The One and Only Reason for Mitt Romney to Pick Paul Ryan as vice : To Blame the Loss on Conservatives - "An attempt at political salvation through ideological extremism"

The New Republic
Just One Reason to Pick Ryan: Blame the Loss on Conservatives
By Noam Scheiber
August 11, 2012

Just One Reason to Pick Ryan: Blame the Loss on Conservatives

Some excerpts :

There are two ways to think about Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan this morning. The first is how it affects Romney’s prospects for winning in November. The second is how it affects the internal struggle between conservatives and moderates within the GOP.

 Ryan’s claim to fame is a long-term budget blueprint that would massively cut Medicare over the coming decades while essentially zeroing out domestic spending on everything else but defense. It would pair this unprecedented austerity with enormous tax cuts for the wealthy. All of these things are, to varying degrees, wildly unpopular. Which makes it hardly surprising that the only time the Ryan budget actually came before voters—in a 2011 congressional special election in upstate New York—it was a political disaster, handing a safe Republican district to a little-known Democrat.

The argument that Ryan could help Romney in November hinges on the enthusiasm conservatives have for him, and on his personal political dexterity. But, whatever conservative elites may tell themselves, Romney’s problems are emphatically not with the right, which is already highly motivated thanks to its mania over ousting Obama. As one top Republican operative recently told me, “the base’s hatred of the president is so intense that [Romney] has all kinds of room to maneuver.” Rather, Romney’s problem is his historically dismal standing among undecided voters, which Ryan will only weaken.

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