To begin with, a quick restatement of the obvious: with a new Gallup poll showing Mitt Romney leading President Obama by two percentage points among likely voters, and the latest Pew Poll showing him four points ahead, the G.O.P. candidate’s audacious effort to relaunch himself as a Massachusetts moderate is going better than he, or anybody else, could have expected. Both polls were published too late for my post updating the electoral map yesterday, but it merely reinforces the message I was seeking to get across. There’s new life in this thing—far too much life, perhaps.

It’s not just the twelve-point swing—yes, twelve—in the head-to-head matchup since Pew’s last poll was taken, in mid-September. The Republican candidate has also caught up with the President on many personal and policy issues. Forty-four per cent of voters see him as a strong leader, the same figure Obama achieved in the Pew survey, and forty-seven per cent say that he has new ideas—three per cent more than Obama scored on this question. Among self-identified swing voters, he leads Obama on jobs by thirty-seven per cent to twenty-four per cent, and by forty-one per cent to twenty per cent on the deficit. He’s even closed the gender gap. Among women, the race is tied at forty-seven per cent each.

Yes, this is just one poll. Pending more surveys finding the same thing, I simply don’t believe that Romney has pulled even among women, for example. But the electoral calculus has undoubtedly changed—and perhaps more dramatically than I pointed out yesterday. Today brought a new national poll, from Reuters/Ipsos, which has the race dead even, and a brace of state polls. In Ohio, a survey from A.R.G. shows Romney now running ahead of Obama by one point, while another survey, from CNN/Opinion Research, shows Obama still leading by four points. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Romney has cut the President’s lead to three points. A week ago, all three of these states were widely regarded as beyond Romney’s reach.

No wonder some of Obama’s most enthusiastic supporters, such as Andrew Sullivan, are hyperventilating. After coasting along for months, Mr. Cool now finds himself in a desperate dogfight. That cannot be denied. But Romney is in the same scrap, and one of his biggest vulnerabilities is standing right next to him.

Neglected in all the coverage of the past few days has been the posing of a basic question: If Romney was planning all along to pivot to the center come the fall, why on earth did he pick Paul Ryan as his running mate?

Since he arrived in Washington, in 1992 ,as a fresh-faced graduate of Miami University of Ohio, many epithets have been hurled in Ryan’s direction. “Moderate” isn’t among them. Having come up through the world of right-wing think tanks and conservative caucuses in the House of Representatives, he is the perfect embodiment of today’s G.O.P.: ideological, inflexible, wholly committed to the project of rolling back the Great Society and the New Deal and replacing them with some mythical vision of minimalist government and the unshackled “free market.”

Therein lies the Mittster’s quandary. When you are busy trying to assure the American public that you believe in helping out the middle class, protecting the aged, and regulating Wall Street, why would you want a Randian social engineer as your running mate? The answer, I think, is that Romney was desperate. Back in late July and early August, his gaffes were mounting, his poll numbers were falling, and Republican insiders were starting to snipe at him. With the Republican Convention coming up, he badly needed to rally his party’s base, and the means he chose of doing so was to select Ryan over Rob Portman or Tim Pawlenty.

In the short term, the ploy worked. It gave Romney’s campaign a boost at the grassroots that it badly needed. Also, it bought off some of his conservative critics, such as Bill Kristol and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, thus assuring that the convention in Tampa would go off relatively smoothly. But it also created a potential problem. What would Ryan say to voters once he was out there on the stump?

If you were Romney, you would hardly want him talking about his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” which he originally put out in 2008 and updated in 2010. That highly toxic voter repellant called for the privatization of Social Security and Medicare; the elimination of tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance; the dismantling of Medicaid; and the slashing of the top income-tax rate to twenty-five per cent. You also wouldn’t want Ryan rehashing his March, 2012, budget proposal, “The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal,” which called for shrinking non-defense discretionary spending to less than three per cent of G.D.P.—about a quarter of its current level—by 2030, as well as getting rid of all taxes on dividends, capital gains, and inheritances—practically the only taxes that some rich folk, such as Romney, actually pay.

Much better, from Romney’s perspective, would be to have Ryan flying around the country telling voters what a fine candidate you are and how great your policy proposals are—not his; helping to raise money by meeting with wealthy donors; taking some potshots at the President; and otherwise keeping it zipped. Which is pretty much what Ryan has done. Aside from invoking the anger of the fact-checkers and the scorn of the media with the long list of whoppers he trotted out during his speech in Tampa, he’s been largely relegated to the inside pages.

But not any more.

For the next few days—and for the rest of the campaign if they have any sense—the Democrats, led in this case by Joe Biden rather than Obama, will be relentlessly beating on Ryan. More specifically, they will be trying to exploit his record, and his selection as the Vice-Presidential candidate, to undermine Romney’s claim to being a pragmatic centrist who can work with Democrats. And the bad news for the Mittster is that this is pretty easy to do. Despite the more moderate tone he has adopted in his public appearances, Romney remains tied to a policy agenda that is still largely in sync with Ryan’s ultra-conservative vision—something Biden and a (hopefully) reënergized Obama should be able to exploit in the coming debates.

I’ll have a more detailed preview of the Veep matchup tomorrow. For now, though, here’s a quick reminder of some of the areas where Romney and Ryan are—how should we say it?—simpatico:

Medicare: By distancing himself from the cost-cutting plan—endorsed, in different incarnations, by Ryan and the Obama Administration—to eliminate roughly seven hundred billion dollars from the Medicare budget over the next ten years, Romney has done a clever bait and switch. But he remains committed to the most incendiary aspect of Ryan’s Medicare proposal—the idea of replacing the current framework, which is highly popular, with a voucher system, in which people below the age of fifty-five would no longer be guaranteed to receive the full cost of a health-insurance plan once they became seniors.