Romney has abandoned a strategy that relied on political mechanics. Mitt's chemistry experiment

Mitt Romney’s risky gamble in naming Paul Ryan as his running mate will hinge on whether the Republican nominee can use the choice to reshape voter attitudes about his own character and leadership style, and avoid becoming ensnared in a defensive debate about Medicare and other popular programs.

An initial rush of favorable polling or publicity in the next few days, if it comes, won’t mean much for the Republican nominee, according to strategists in both parties and veterans of previous campaigns. Plenty of vice presidential selections enjoyed a similar rise — before plummeting into disaster.


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Nor should Romney bank heavily on Ryan’s skills as a “wonk,” or his ability to speak fluently about the budget, both traits that Romney and his aides touted as important assets in the selection of the 42-year-old Wisconsin Republican. There is virtually no chance that deeply entrenched views about entitlement programs — majority opinions that at least on the surface are strongly at odds with Ryan’s record — can be reversed in the 12 weeks before Election Day.

Instead, whether the Ryan selection will turn out to be shrewd or self-destructive will be mostly settled over the next three weeks, in the run-up to the party conventions and in the major addresses there. It is in this critical window, many observers believe, that Romney must make the Ryan selection less about specific policy arguments and more of a general statement about his own values — about his own seriousness, self-confidence and willingness to embrace political risk to solve big problems.

This marks a dramatic shift in Romney’s approach to winning the presidency.

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One way to think about the new race is in scientific terms. Romney has abandoned a strategy that relied on political mechanics in favor of one that relies on political chemistry.

A mechanical campaign aims to motivate certain identifiable blocs of voters through specific and well-rehearsed techniques — targeted appeals to well-defined demographic or geographic groups, designed to work in a classic action-reaction style.

Politics as chemistry is different. It seeks to change the relationship between the candidate and the electorate in a more fundamental way — encouraging voters to look at him and his capacity for leadership in a entirely new light, just as adding a new ingredient to a chemical solution can create an entirely new substance. For a campaign, this transformation is as much a psychological exercise as a narrowly political one.

An example of the politics-as-chemistry phenomenon came in 1992, when Bill Clinton was trailing badly after a primary season in which he became known largely for personal scandal and political calculation. But his selection of Al Gore as running mate transformed his prospects, projecting an appealing image of two young and serious-minded moderates, and giving voters occasion to look anew at Clinton’s leadership traits. He vaulted into a first-place position that he never surrendered, not because voters were necessarily ecstatic about Gore — a presidential also-ran four years earlier — but because the choice told them something important about Clinton’s values.

It is at least possible that Romney will benefit in a similar fashion by using Ryan to make a positive statement about his own values.

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Former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a Romney backer who was on George W. Bush’s 2000 short list, said the pick would help persuade voters that Romney “is not a classic, my-favorite-color-is-plaid politician.

“It shows that Romney means business, Romney needs to tackle these problems, notwithstanding the upside and downside of politics,” said Keating, who also acknowledged that senior citizens will be the key test for Ryan. “Are they going to be frightened, cowed and buffaloed by ‘Medi-scare’? If the answer is yes, then obviously it’s going to be a challenge to his candidacy.”

A veteran Democratic operative agreed.

“The only way a VP pick can influence a race is if it tells us something about the presidential candidate,” said Nathan Daschle, former executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, adding that Romney’s history of political caution and equivocation means “he scores low on the leadership test.”

Avoiding a safe pick, Daschle added, “shows us a different — and much more presidential — side. We want our presidents to be big, and this is the first time Romney has shown us he’s capable of being big.”

The problem: Turning the Ryan selection into a big and positive statement about Romney’s leadership is the only obvious way the choice will be successful. There are lots of different ways, by contrast, that the pick could end as a failure.

Voters could decide that Paul Ryan is a perfectly nice and principled man — but one whose policy views they strongly disagree with. The “Ryan budget” authored by Romney’s running mate calls for widespread domestic spending cuts, including an overhaul of the Medicare program for senior citizens. A Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll released earlier this month found that 79 percent of registered voters said they would oppose reducing Medicare benefits in order to bring down the deficit.

Voters might also decide on other grounds that Ryan is not a positive addition to the GOP ticket. Experienced in Washington, Ryan is mostly untested in a national context, and he is younger than all but two vice presidential nominees in the past 60 years — Dan Quayle (41 years old in 1988) and Richard Nixon (39 in 1952.)

Finally, they might agree that the Ryan selection makes a large statement about Romney’s character — but conclude that it is a negative statement. Democrats will try to make the case that Ryan represents extremism and a selfish, devil-take-the-hindmost ideology.

To some veteran strategists, the Ryan pick simply highlights the perils of the vice-presidential selection process. In his memoir, former Vice President Dick Cheney said winning choices often come down to who has the least negative potential.

Embracing the chemistry vs. mechanics metaphor, Matt Bennett, a Democratic operative and thought leader, noted: “The obvious mechanical picks like Bentsen (we can win Texas!) and Lieberman (Jews in Florida LOVE that guy!) often flop. But they are safer. Chemistry is tricky in VP picks — it’s more art than science. John Kerry picked another Eastern senator with good hair, hoping for an injection of youth and optimism. Didn’t happen. And most disastrously of all, McCain [in picking Sarah Palin] stirred up a mixture of unknown chemicals and hoped it would go down smoothly. It didn’t.”

The Ryan pick, Bennett said, echoes in some ways the Clinton-Gore dynamic — “Two vibrant, successful guys, brimming with confidence that they can fix things.

“But Ryan brings with him much, much more: a bubbling cauldron of difficult-to-defend ideas that are fine for a House member but spell catastrophe in national politics,” Bennett added. “And if the notion takes hold that Ryan is a radical — if he is unfit to serve in a position requiring compromise and balance — that could create a chemical reaction of another kind for Romney that would keep Obama in the White House.”

Another veteran Democrat, Paul Begala, who served in the Clinton White House, said Romney’s choice is best viewed not through the analogy of science but of math.

“The way to think of it is not chemistry, it’s algebra,” Begala said. “Romney’s problem is that the whole campaign has been solving for the wrong variable.”

By this logic, Romney’s choice of Ryan was designed to offset a prevailing view among Washington elites that the nominee lacks genuine conviction and that he has not done enough to satisfy conservatives.

But for most independent voters, Begala believes, the problem isn’t that Romney is a cautious political chameleon, it’s that “he’s a predatory vulture capitalist — Ryan doesn’t solve that.”

In algebra terms, Begala said, “He’s been solving for C - conservative — when he should be solving for M — middle class.”

Republicans counter that Romney is facing an opponent in President Barack Obama whose own political equation is missing some key elements.

Four years ago, Obama ran a movement campaign organized around his personal connection with voters. This time, Obama is running an overwhelmingly mechanical campaign, seizing on narrow issues to use as campaign weaponry with influential voting blocs.

Suburban white women hear from Obama’s campaign about Romney’s vow to defund Planned Parenthood. Spanish-speaking voters hear about Romney’s “self-deportation” policies. In rural Ohio — not a hotbed of pro-Obama sentiment — the president’s campaign airs ads attacking Romney’s past views on coal. Independents and persuadable voters, across the board, get saturated with information about Romney’s wealth and business career.

“Obama is running a campaign based on the idea of smashing the country into a million pieces and then putting enough pieces together to get to 51 percent. It makes a mockery of everything he ran on four years ago and has been a failure,” a Romney adviser said. “It’s old politics versus telling the truth about problems and working to solutions.”

“What I’m struck by is how the Republican campaign seems to be about big issues and big message — the state of the economy. The president’s campaign is about groups — women, minorities, ramping up turnout. It’s two different approaches,” agreed Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary under George W. Bush.

Fleischer said the key metrics to watch, to gauge the success of the Ryan rollout, will be polling questions about Romney’s personality and character.

“Ultimately, it comes down to, do [voters] give him a more lasting, better look, because this changes the way they think about Mitt Romney?” he said. “You want to look in the approval ratings of Romney, see if people like his judgment, like his decision-making.”

A Democratic pollster not associated with Obama believes this is over-thinking the issue. Elderly voters are a key swing constituency in this election. If Romney loses these voters — many of whom are deeply disillusioned with Obama — or simply splits them evenly because of the Medicare issue the Ryan pick will be judged “a disaster,” this Democrat said.

In a CNN poll last week that gave Obama a 7-percentage -point lead, overall, Romney had a 19-point lead with voters over 65. But these older voters are the ones most likely to be concerned about Medicare and Social Security.

In an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer Sunday night on “60 Minutes,” Ryan and Romney both took pains to say their plans were about saving Medicare, rather than gutting it.

“My mom is a Medicare senior in Florida,” Ryan said. “Our point is we need to preserve their benefits, because government made promises to them that they’ve organized their retirements around. In order to make sure we can do that, you must reform it for those of us who are younger.”

A senior Republican with extensive experience in presidential campaigns observed: “To me the key is how much Romney and Ryan can focus on growth, not just budget-cutting and explain the current malaise is the result of fiscal inaction and their mission is to preserve Medicare and other programs for a different era. They need to do this in a reassuring and non-ideological way, not [making it] about a GOP revolution. “

Karl Rove, the modern GOP’s most prominent operative, professed optimism that Romney and Ryan can strike this balance. Asked where the Ryan pick helps Romney, Rove responded, “Wherever there are deficit hawks, the GOP ticket does better. And it is easier to defend the reform argument for Medicare than the status quo, ‘let-it-go-broke’ side.”

Dan Schnur, a longtime California operative and former aide to John McCain’s 2000 campaign, noted that while early polls may not matter much, we’ll know by October whether the Ryan gamble paid off.

“Wait until the vice-presidential debate and see who talks about Medicare more often,” Schnur said. “If it’s Ryan, that means the Republicans are winning the argument about the economy and the deficit, and that Romney’s bet paid off. If it’s Biden, that means that the campaign isn’t about Obama and jobs anymore but about Romney and frightened senior citizens, which means the risk backfired in a big way.”

Jonathan Martin contributed to this report.