Thoughts on Paul Ryan

1) Romney has done what he needed to do – not choose another Sarah Palin. Most American political observers seem to subscribe to the Game Change narrative of the 2008 election, in which John McCain threw away any chance of winning by an impulsive and desperate choice of running mate. This narrative has its faults (i.e. it overlooks the fact that it wasn’t the Republicans’ year regardless of who was on the ticket, and feeds into the conservative narrative that America is a ‘centre-right country’ and therefore Obama’s election was some sort of temporary aberration), but conventional wisdom is often at variance with the facts. As one of the Very Serious People adored by the professional centrists/bipartisans/post-partisans in Manhattan and D.C., Ryan won’t be treated with the same class- and gender-inflected contempt that Palin was.

2) For those keeping track of the religious and ethnic affiliations of presidential and vice-presidential candidates, Ryan will be the eighth Catholic on a major-party ticket, the second Catholic on the Republican ticket (after Barry Goldwater tapped William E. Miller in 1964), the fifth Catholic vice-presidential nominee (after Miller, Sargent Shriver, Geraldine Ferraro, and Joe Biden), the seventh Irish-American on a major-party ticket, and the third Irish-American running mate (after Miller and Biden). He is also partly of German-American heritage; I believe he is the first to appear on a major-party ticket since Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956 (Walter Mondale was nicknamed ‘Fritz’, but was actually Norwegian-American). Thus, we have the first presidential election ever in which none of the four major-party nominees is a white Protestant.

3) Choosing a sitting member of the House is certainly unusual – apart from the sui generis case of then-Minority Leader Gerald Ford’s double elevation, the last House members to be elected President and Vice-President respectively were James Garfield (R-OH) in 1880 and John Nance Garner (D-TX) in 1932. From the Republicans’ perspective, it makes sense. Ryan can only do so much as Budget Committee chair, there are other young talents (such as Eric Cantor) blocking his path to the Speakership, and Wisconsin doesn’t provide any Senate openings in the near future. By nominating him for V-P, even if the ticket loses, he would have to be pencilled in as the favourite for the presidential nomination in 2016; the intervening four years having been spent developing credentials on foreign policy and social issues to match his economic ones.