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August 12, 2012 07:47 PM UTC

Reminder: Paul Ryan Is Not "All In"

  • 15 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

One detail in the choice of Wisconsin GOP Rep. Paul Ryan to run for vice president with Mitt Romney intrigues us politically, as the Racine, Wisconsin Journal Times reported yesterday:

Paul Ryan can and will run for both vice president and U.S. representative this November.

Wisconsin law allows such a setup and Ryan will take advantage of it, campaigning as Republican Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate and as a seven-term U.S. representative seeking re-election in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, which includes Racine County.

“Congressman Ryan will be on the ballot for the U.S. House of Representatives seat,” Ryan spokesman Kevin Seifert said in an email to The Journal Times Saturday, just hours after presidential candidate Romney named Ryan his vice presidential pick during a campaign stop in Norfolk, Va. The USS Wisconsin served as the backdrop for the long-awaited announcement.

The Journal Times reports that should the Romney-Ryan ticket prevail in November, a special election would be held to replace Ryan as representative of Wisconsin’s 1st district.

And though this story doesn’t mention it, obviously, Ryan could keep his seat in Congress if his bid for vice president doesn’t work out by staying on the ballot in WI-1. Ryan does have a Democratic opponent, and the district is considered swingable with a Cook PVI of R+2. Ryan’s challenger, Rob Zerban, released a poll late last week that asserts the race is winnable.

Joe Lieberman stayed on the ballot in the Connecticut U.S. Senate race in 2000, and easily defeated his Republican challenger. Likewise Joe Biden easily won in Delaware in 2008–and won the vice presidency the same day. We assume it would be legal under Colorado law too; we haven’t heard specifically yet. Either way, this is one reason why it’s easier to ascend to higher office from a four or six-year term if you time it correctly (see: John Hickenlooper in 2016).

In 2004, on the other hand, Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards chose not to run for re-election to North Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat, which would have also been a concurrent race–and probably not a blowout. We think the tenor of politics in 2012 favors the choice to not run for two offices, and suggest that Ryan’s “hedging his bets” could damage the Romney-Ryan ticket–and maybe Ryan’s other race, too.

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15 thoughts on “Reminder: Paul Ryan Is Not “All In””

    1. on NPR this morning (cut their funding for THIS) that one of our young Mr. Ryan’s first jobs was driving the Oscar Meyer Weiner Car. Doesn’t he ever change jobs?

      He’s answered  a long standng question this WI boy has had for 50 years. Who drives the Oscar Meyer car. Paul Ryan. Who’d think it?

      The Biden Ryan debates will be ennaresting and entertaining.

      http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi…

  3. is going to make Kerry campaign style assumptions and miss ops, the race to define Ryan is on. Since he still polls pretty low recognition with voters, nows the time to jump right in and do the defining.

    David Axelrod, for example, already has the word out urging Dems to get to know Paul Ryan, to make sure voters know his record, his policies and what a Romney/Ryan administration would look like. Many other Dems have been aggressively getting the message out since the announcement.

    Not cheerleading.  Just think that since we’ve all been complaining for years about the ways Dem pols and campaigns screw up (me as much as anybody), we shouldn’t bend over backwards to see everything as negative.  Sometimes Dems actually do something smart and effective. You don’t have to be Pollyanna to take notice. Hi, Dave.  

    1. Here is an excellent (if rather long at 6 pages) article by New York Times Magazine’s Jonathan Chait deconstructing Paul Ryan’s career in Washington.  The meat of the oppo research is on pp.4-6:

      Ryan’s mastery of these details does not signify openness to evidence or a willingness to shape his views to real-world evidence. It actually signifies the opposite. And yet Ryan has grasped that the aura of specificity he has cultivated paradoxically renders the specifics themselves irrelevant.

      For a virtuoso display of this principle in action, return to another vintage Ryan moment: his Dave profile from last year, where he awed a swooning reporter by opening up the budget to a random page and fingered a boondoggle. The item Ryan pointed to was the Obama administration’s reform of the student-loan industry. “Direct loans-this is perfect,” Ryan said. “So direct loans, that’s new spending on autopilot, that had no congressional oversight, and it gave the illusion that they were cutting spending.”

      The exchange is so perversely revealing that it rewards explanation. For decades, the government helped make college more affordable through “guaranteed loans“-it encouraged banks to lend money to students by promising to repay the banks if the students defaulted. Banks were making billions of dollars in profits at virtually no risk. The General Accounting Office, a kind of in-house fiscal watchdog for the federal government, issued sixteen reports over the years noting how the government could save money simply by issuing the loans itself and cutting out the middleman.

      It was the simplest, no-brainer pot of savings you could find-ending pure corporate welfare, just like in the movie Dave. The cause attracted support from think tanks, as well as the moderate Wisconsin Republican Tom Petri, an eclectic reformer who is sort of the real-life version of the Paul Ryan character who appears on television. Two National Review editors endorsed eliminating guaranteed loans in an article advocating a new reform conservatism.

      The banks lobbied fiercely to protect their gravy train. Among the staunchest advocates of those government-subsidized banks was … Paul Ryan, who fought to protect bank subsidies that many of his fellow Republicans deemed too outrageous to defend. In 2009, Obama finally eliminated the guaranteed-lending racket. It could save the government an estimated $62 billion, according to the CBO.

      Sorry if I over-bolded the above sections — it’s just so outlandish a story to be believed.  Paul Ryan was able to turn a sterling example of cutting government waste into an indictment of runaway (Democratic) government spending.

      Got to give him credit — he has nerves (and balls) of steel.  Either that, or he shares Romney’s trait of not realizing that every time he opens his mouth, a lie usually pops out.

      1. Just like Air Force1, Marine 1,  all the  WH security, trips to Hawaii, dog walkers, and on and on.

        Obama has also not proposed an insanely irresponsible  federal budget …

        And Representative Ryan’s budget would eliminate most of the federal government. The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of his budget showed all non-health care, non-Security Security spending shrinking to 4.5 percent of GDP by 2040 and to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. The military budget is currently over 4.0 percent of GDP and has never been less than 3.0 percent of GDP since the start of the Cold War.

        This means that if we take Representative Ryan’s views seriously, he wants to get rid of the State Department, the Justice Department, the national park system, the federal court system, the air traffic control system and most of the other activities that we associate with the federal government. This must be the case, since CBO undertook the analysis at Ryan’s request and surely he would have corrected them if they misrepresented his position.

        Dean Baker

        Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research :

        http://www.politico.com/arena/…

        For a guy who has never worked outside gov’t – unless you count giving away samples from the weinermobile and flipping burgers, he was careful to avoid any sequestering of his paycheck, health insurance, public pension, etc and etc.  And then he wanted to undo the DOD sequestration part of the deal – all the while driving the US credit rating down, which did nothing but COST us more.

        I say- charity begins at home.  He should follow his partner’s advice, borrow some money from his parents and start a company.

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