Thursday, August 21, 2008

Thursday, August 21   

Been distracted much of the day by all this McCain houses stuff. But I've been talking to more people about the veep thing, and the picture I get is this:  McCain is sitting in front of a console with a switch with two positions: GAMBLE and PLAY IT SAFE.  If he moves the switch to GAMBLE, he picks Lieberman.  If he moves it to PLAY IT SAFE, he picks Pawlenty.  It seems increasingly clear that a Tom Ridge gamble doesn't make a lot of sense, and a Mitt Romney choice isn't a big gamble, but it isn't really safe either.

Still, Romney is an unquantifiable here.  I mentioned yesterday that if McCain were to pick Ridge, "it will be because he likes him personally and believes Ridge can win Pennsylvania."  Now, it's not clear to me that McCain will make the choice based on whether a veep could carry a particular state, but if he did, I've been told, there is a feeling that Romney has a pretty good argument to make that choosing him would help quite a bit in Nevada and Colorado, with their significant Mormon populations.  That makes some sense; it's my guess that Romney could do more to bring in Nevada and Colorado than Ridge could in Pennsylvania.

The gamble to a Romney pick is two-fold.  One, there are all those attack ads about Romney's flip-flops (some of them produced by the McCain campaign).  That would certainly be useful to the Obama campaign. And two, there are worries that some portion of the social conservative base would have concerns about Mormonism.  That would be a problem inside the Republican party.  Finally, all I hear about Romney from the McCain circle is that the animosity that existed earlier between the two men is gone, and that Romney has done a great job as a surrogate for McCain.  It seems to me that there is more of an emphasis on the absence of animosity than on any actual fondness between the two men, so that could be another problem.

08/21 06:18 PM