Obama's Last Day: 01/19/2017

Over the weekend, Mitt Romney introduced his choice for running mate. Ladies and gentlemen meet the latest GOP sacrificial lamb, Paul Ryan.  Now the mainstream media will spend the next few weeks in orgasmic bliss, as they always do with VP picks, pouring over the "Ryan mystique" and analyzing what, if anything, he brings to the Romney campaign.  I can save them a lot of effort and sum up what Ryan brings in three words…Obama’s Second Term.

Seriously, let’s take a good hard look at this pick.  Paul Ryan is a member of the most hated congress in the history of the republic (with an approval rating somewhere in the low teens), and the author of the most hated budget plan in the history of budgets.  A plan, I might add, that Team Obama now has from now to November to totally decimate.  Furthermore, Ryan has no foreign policy experience.  And since we’ve already seen that you can’t take Mittens out of the country, this pick pretty much concedes the foreign policy argument to Team Obama.  However, the pick of Ryan for VP does give Romney two things.  First, it keeps us off the issue of his tax returns (for the moment).  Second, it gets him the love and admiration of the Tea-Party.  This in and of itself should give the campaign some pause, because if he’s still trying to get cool-points from this crowd three months after he supposedly secured his party’s nomination, he’s in REAL trouble.  And Romney is in REAL trouble.  His overseas adventure was a diplomatic disaster, the tax thing and the Bain thing aren’t going to go away anytime soon, people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh have already turned on him, his poll numbers are sinking faster than the Titanic after the iceberg, and as for his favorability…let’s be real…people have a more favorable opinion of herpes.

The only way to explain picking Paul Ryan pure desperation.  Romney needed that now hopelessly clichéd “Game Change” moment.  And it looks like he got it, for Team Obama that is.  For the past two years Ryan has been the “boogeyman” target for Democrats, and now he’s out in the open with a big ol’ bullseye on his chest.  Not only is Romney going to have to explain and defend Ryan’s policies, his ideologies, and his beliefs, he’s going to have to defend HIM, and somehow do this without pissing off the extreme right-wing of the base which he’s so afraid of.  Now there are some who say liberals like myself are underestimating what Ryan can bring.  And to be sure, he’s no Sarah Palin.  For one thing, he has a grasp of the English language.  For another, he seems to have a working brain.  But let’s be real.  This pick won't get Romney independents, moderates, or the few Blue-Dog Democrats stupid enough to consider voting for him.  It also doesn't get him Ohio (Rob Portman), Florida (Marco Rubio), or Virginia (Bob "Ultra-sound" McDonnell).  Furthermore, it's not likely to get him Wisconsin (Ryan's home state), or Massachusetts (Romney's home state).  And one more thing to think about.  The last time a GOP presidential candidate was this desperate, slipping in the polls, and losing the support of his base, they ended up with…Sarah Palin.  And we all know how well that worked out for them.

I wonder if I can score tickets to Obama’s second term inauguration in January.