Enough to make you veep

Mitt Romney is about to discover how hard it is to choose a running-mate

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The media is committing journalistic malpractice if it will report another white guy as just "boring"

Romeny supports (and his VP will support) the personhood amendment that was too right-wing for Mississippi. He supports the repeal of the Lilly Ledbetter Act. He calls the Arizona 'papers please' law as a model.

This is not boring.

It is frightening


I'd suggest that Romney choose the extremely rotund Gov. Chris Christie as his VP.

Given that an estimated 1/3rd of the US is obese, Gov. Christie could help pull in the "horizontally challenged" vote.

Public Dude

“At a minimum a potential vice-president needs to look capable of taking over as president. This was the test Mrs. Palin is deemed to have failed, despite all the knowledge of Russia she gleaned by being able to see it from Alaska.”

Sarah Palin was not even a good governor of Alaska let alone takeover as the president of the US. Her choosing not only sank John McCain’s presidential bid but also showed flaws in his thinking. He famously uttered that the American financial system was in sound shape a day before Lehman Brothers went belly up. He wanted to loosen Wall Street regulations even as Wall Street was sinking the nation. He also came across as a war monger. It seems there is no war he dislikes or none he wants to end.

Condoleezza Rice would be a similar mistake if Mitt Romney were to choose her. She never had an opinion of her own it appeared when she was the Secretary of State, other than being repeating whatever Bush/Cheney said no matter how asinine it was. She was a parrot-nincompoop of the first order.

Truly Yours

How fitting that Condoleezza Rice is the favorite du jour of GOP voters: she can lie on the record nearly as well as the sainted Reagan. She called the "intelligence" justifying the invasion of Iraq "as clear as any intelligence I've ever seen and I've been in this business a long time." As we now know, the "evidence" was not even remotely compelling but utterly implausible--if not deliberately manufactured.


She's simultaneously intelligent enough to have known that the invasion was committed under false pretenses, immoral enough to have supported the deception then, and foolish enough to continue to defend it even now. Her values are revealed when she says she was "captured" by Bush Jr.'s "No Child Left Behind," another great tragedy of the Bush/Cheney regime. Even more revealing, she liked Bush's notion of "the soft bigotry of low expectations," neocon speak for politically correct racism.

For a party of sycophants in thrall to the oligarchy, she's the perfect choice! Or could it simply be that the GOP fantasizes about neutralizing Obama's racial advantage with black voters? Remember the Herman Cain infatuation?


I say pick John McCain. The media and Palin would go wild as well as SNL and the light night talk shows.


There is one and only one way Romney would win in 2012.
Romney should pick Ron Paul as vice president, to take charge of the Senate and bring sanity to public spending.
USA is divided in thirds: Rep, Dem, Independents.
With the Ind joining the Rep, Romney would thereby get 63.2 percent of the popular vote, and over 69 percent of the electoral college.
Unfortunately, Ron Paul would soon join JFK, RobertK, King, and others who changed America for the better.


If Romney ends up choosing Condi Rice or Marco Rubio, would the Republican base really show up to the booth en masse to vote for a moderate/moderate-ethnic-minority ticket?
Romney is already having an enthusiasm problem with his base because he's not "conservative" and God-fearing enough. Both Rice and Rubio are quite moderate and their ethnicities would not please the large amount of racists still left in the Republican Party. How much enthusiasm can he add from that same group by selecting a moderate ethnic minority as his running mate?
If Romney could convince Gingrich to shrink his own head from XXXL to M, wouldn't Gingrich make more sense?

K2hKKL6yVY in reply to unclefalter

Well, he IS fat. But the issues... Like how he lied to the New Jersey public to cancel a vital piece of infrastructure, in order to not raise the state gas tax by a few cents per gallon? Or how he vetoed legalization of same-sex marriage in order to prove his Republican bona-fides? Those issues?


Jindal could definitely be the next Quayle. But whoever gets picked, it seems likely to be a career-ender, so then the question is, does one of these people even really want it?


I'm pretty sure "Veep" is a comedy, not a drama, and the odds seem good that one of the running jokes will be the relative powerlessness and undesirability of the job.

Jesse Lansner

There's another important quality all good VP nominees share (and that Sarah Palin also failed): they shouldn't upstage the main candidate. Yet another reason why Romney is likely to make a 'boring' pick.

RichPort in reply to antiquarian

Senator Rubio will be the lucky recipient of repeated requests to see his long form birth certificate and concrete guarantees that he is not some Manchurian candidate who secretly worships Castro... formalities, you know...


I still think Rubio or Suzanna Martinez would be great choices, but I am more and more convinced that Romney should pick a female veep candidate. Portman, Daniels, and the rest of the white-male category are far too bland to provide anything remotely resembling voter enthusiasm. However, if Romeny is savvy enough to pick a qualified woman as a running mate, I think battleground for the independent voters takes a decidedly different aspect. Women won't vote for a woman just out of gender loyalty, but people who might otherwise sit at home might actually be inspired to go out if they felt they were casting a historic ballot. This is what happened with young people in 2008 -- folks who would have sooner gone out for a pizza than cast a ballot showed up at polling placed because they were participating in a "historic" election. The novelty of electing Obama has pretty much worn off, so what else is there to energize an apathetic and uninspired middle of independents and moderates?

You would have to pick someone with some serious gravitas though -- Sarah Palin was a joke in this regard. However, a candidate like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Kay Bailey Huchison, or Christine Todd Whitman would have the appropriate resume to justify saying "she is qualified to step in as President in a pinch".


It would be shocking for Marco Rubio "the political wunderkind" as TE puts it, to hitch his career on Romney's bandwagon. He's picked winners so far...


"Dick Cheney, or so his critics aver, became George W. Bush’s Rasputin"

I think Cardinal Richelieu is probably a more appropriate comparison.

I hate to say this, but Romney could probably make all the gaffes he wants right now and I bet it wouldn't matter until August.

Maybe some of his negatives would rise (or conversely not drop off as Americans think of more important things, like summer vacations, barbacuing, etc.).

Michael Dunne in reply to FlownOver

However, I think the imbroglio with Palin back in 2008 means the media will be waiting with sharp knives to dissect whoever the pick is - Maybe more than a few political figures don't have the appetite for such treatment.



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