Friday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” in a segment called “Where’s Pauldo?” host Rachel Maddow wondered why vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has been all but sidelined by the campaign to elect former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) to the presidency.

While Romney has been on the ground in the swing states, Ryan, who was once the campaign’s golden boy, has been campaigning in reliably red, Republican strongholds where the vote is virtually assured to favor Romney over President Barack Obama, and where the national media presence is fairly thin on the ground.

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In the last ten days, Maddow pointed out, Romney has been dividing his time among the “7 swingy-est of the swing states,” traveling five times to Ohio, considered a key battleground state. Ryan, meanwhile, has been campaigning solo, appearing via video at an event in Texas featuring Glenn Beck and former Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, and traveling in Georgia and South Carolina, and appearing at a $5,000-per-ticket fundraiser in Huntsville, Alabama.

“The election is a week from Tuesday,” Maddow said in bewilderment. “You’re in Alabama? Is Alabama swinging this year?”

What’s happening, Maddow theorized, is that as the Romney campaign has tried to re-cast their top candidate as a moderate centrist, they have realized that Ryan’s base-appealing, far-right politics on abortion and the budget could cost the Republican ticket undecided, moderate voters.

Ryan has been relegated, she said, not to just “preaching to the choir, he’s preaching to the mirror.”

Watch the clip, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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