Mitt: "Good golly, I hope you can save me." Paul: "I'm dumb enough to believe I can."
How bad a presidential candidate is Mitt Romney? So bad that,
according to Politico, his own campaign is not even trying to pretend he doesn't suck. He's got the charm of a dust mite, he's already "exhausted" from campaigning, he can't draw big crowds, and no one likes him. So they're hoping that Paul "Hail Mary" Ryan can give him that special something he needs to save his destined-to-fail campaign:
Romney and Ryan had planned to go their separate ways before meeting up at the end of the month at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. But then campaign strategists saw how much of a psychic boost Romney got from Ryan — and how much more animated Romney appeared on television with his younger running mate at his side.
“They really like each other and they feed off of each other,” campaign manager Matt Rhoades said. “There’s an energy, there’s a chemistry.”
Advisers say Ryan helps ease the former governor’s feeling of isolation.
Romney's "feeling of isolation"? From what? His wife on the trail with him? His sons on the trail with him? The voters who think he's really weird because he doesn't know how to talk to people without insulting them and their cookies and their country? His money stashed far away in exotic islands?
Mitt Romney is running for president, for Pete's sake, and it's his name at the top of the ticket—as the campaign apparently has to continue reminding everyone—but he's made such a mess of it that now the campaign desperately, very desperately, hopes the risky VP pick and his boost-giving P90X body will save Romney from a humiliating defeat at the hands of President Obama.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It was the same risky move John McCain made in 2008 when he picked Sarah Palin to give him and his flaccid campaign a boost. And while Palin (like Ryan) could draw bigger crowds than the top-of-the-ticket candidate and could fire up the base with all of her hate speech and lies, that didn't make McCain look better or more presidential, and it didn't save his campaign either.
After weeks of insisting that the Romney campaign had learned the hard lessons of 2008 and would very deliberately do the opposite of everything McCain did, including seeking an "incredibly boring white guy" for the VP spot to avoid any Palintastrophes, the fact that the campaign has thrown out its carefully devised anti-McCain strategy and is now following the same disastrous roadmap McCain did, starting with, in McCain's own words, "a pretty bold choice" for the VP slot, is pretty shocking.
This is a strategy Romneyland has said repeatedly is a loser, and yet, they've run out of all other options. Can't talk about Romney's time as governor. Can't talk about Romney's time at Bain. Ann, his supposed "greatest asset," isn't exactly winning people over. The only move left is the one Romneyland has already admitted won't work: a desperate VP pick to shake up the campaign, "boost" the candidate, rally the base, and hope to hell that this time, somehow, it will work out differently for the Romney/Ryan ticket than it did for the McCain/Palin ticket.
Will the risky strategy fail Romney, just as it failed McCain? You betcha.