EDMUND BURKEWho will Mitt Romney pick as his running mate?
Except for the President’s re-election team, which must be prepared to run against the Romney-X ticket, there is only one reason to play this game. For fun! That’s reason enough, so let the game begin.
Romney will have two key criteria for this decision.
First, Romney will pick someone perceived as making a capable president, should the need arise. Because we are still in the wake of the Sarah Palin disaster and Romney is risk adverse, this will be his single most important factor. Romney wants to be certain that commentators will hail his choice as a serious and intelligent person who is knowledgeable about national affairs. Romney also wants to be confident his choice will perform well in interviews and the vice presidential debate. (The vice presidential debate will be no cake walk because Joe Biden is a formidable debater.) Romney has undoubtedly told his selection team a hundred times, I want someone who will not implode when Katie Couric asks brain-stumpers like: What do you read?
Second, Romney will pick the most centrist person he can find who will not send the hard-right ballistic. After having moved far to the right to win the nomination, Romney must drift back to the center. That is often the modus operendi of Republican nominees – but Romney has a unique problem. A key knock against him is that he’s a flip-flopper. His Republican opponents warned that Romney’s a moderate temporarily posing as a conservative, and one of his own advisers predicted Romney will change like an Etch A Sketch. Romney will have a terribly difficult time modifying positions; any modification can be used as evidence against him. He must, therefore, move back to the center through signals and symbols, and the most important of these will be his VP selection.
With that said, here’s my prediction: Senator Rob Portman (R-OH).
I could provide a rank-ordered list of possibilities, but it’s going to be Portman, so why bother? Here’s why: Portman has fourteen years of experience in Congress – twelve in the House, two in the Senate – and two years experience as U.S. Trade Representative and Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). One negative is that those last two positions were in the disgraced George W. Bush administration, but at least Portman had nothing to do with Bush-43 foreign policy, and hey, no candidate’s perfect. Portman is smart, solid, and a wonk. He’s co-author of a book about a nineteenth-century Shaker community, for goodness sake. Compare that to Palin’s Going Rogue! Romney will find Portman’s top-shelf academic background – Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan Law School – reassuring. According to one analysis, Portman is the seventh least conservative Republican in the Senate. Being what the Republican Party is these days, that still makes him extremely conservative. Nevertheless, he’s ideologically positioned just right for Romney. Finally, Portman is a very popular politician in the important swing-state of Ohio.
Here’s why it won’t be other frequently-mentioned possibilities.
Marco Rubio is too hard-right and has too little federal experience. Coming from a family of Cuban expatriates, he’s not as attractive to voters of Mexican heritage (who comprise the majority of Hispanic voters) as many assume. Rubio also suffers from the ironic deficit of being too engaging. No presidential candidate can afford to be upstaged by his running mate. By contrast, Portman is not boring, but he’s not too far from boring either. Again, just right for Romney.
It won’t be Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty, Bob McDonnell, Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley, or Jeb Bush because they are governors. One of Romney’s greatest weaknesses is that he has only four years of government experience of any kind, and no experience whatsoever in the federal government. Romney needs someone with federal experience. In addition, Christie is too undisciplined; he'd be certain to create dust-ups during the campaign, and risk-adverse Romney will find Christie too dicey. As for Jeb Bush, the last thing Romney needs is people recalling the Bush-43 administration. It doesn't matter that Jeb had nothing to do with it; it's just too soon for someone named Bush on the ticket. Daniels is the most tempting of the group – he, like Portman, is a serious person – but running with another governor is not what Romney needs most.
Romney and his team will be tempted to take Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico: she’s a woman and he needs to close the gender gap. But Martinez, of course, is a governor. Moreover, she has only been governor for two years, and before that was a district attorney. Romney will consider her too risky. Romney will think about Condoleezza Rice, who is smart and has deep foreign policy knowledge and experience. But even if Rice wasn't one of its principal architects, she’s associated with the Iraq war, and Romney and his team will decide that baggage is too heavy.
It’s not going to be Paul Ryan because he’s too hard-right and is the author of a budget proposal that – notwithstanding Ryan's claims – is not truly about the deficit (or it would not include tax cuts) but about pursuing an extreme agenda of drastically shrinking the federal government. It’s bad enough Romney had to endorse Ryan’s budget proposal; he’s not going to tie himself tighter to the millstone of the Ryan budget and then jump into the sea. Although he has some attractive attributes, it’s not going to be Senator John Thune (R-SD) because he’s too far right and from a state with only three electoral votes.
So it’s going to Portman. It’s a prediction you can take to the bank.