1) As more than one commentator has noted: can you imagine the outrage if a Democratic candidate who never served in the military announced a VP pick who never served in the military – from the deck of a battleship?
2) Also as more than one commentator has pointed out: this is the first ticket in American history without a Protestant. LDS and Catholic. In a way, this is a tribute to how things have changed – tribal loyalties have shifted and political team trumps everything else on the right. Because if you’d run a Mormon and a Papist thirty years ago down South, that campaign would have been deader than fuckin’ fried chicken…but in 2012 the Romney/Ryan bill will sweep the Deep South states without a fight.
3) More amazing (and personally gratifying to me) is that even though the Republican platform could not be more intrinsically Southern if you dipped it in buttermilk and fried it in pig drippings, this is the second consecutive election in which neither ticket will feature anyone even tangentially Southern. The last time this happened unambiguously was 1920-24, a time when there was no such thing as a GOP down South and when the national Democrats were still on the run from “rum, Romanism and rebellion”. 1968-72 was ambiguous; Spiro Agnew was from a former slave state that never seceded, Tom Eagleton was from Missouri (even if he only lasted a few days on the ticket), and George Wallace actually won states as a third-party candidate (the last man to do so) so there was still a decisive Southern politician in play for ’68.
I say all that to say this: sixteen years ago, the core of my proposed dissertation in political science was the proposition that Southern politics were being nationalized, especially on the right. And now look at the GOP platform and its commitments: loudly partisan and patriotic, anti-taxation, pro-business, opposed to government expansion, dismissive of public services when not outright taking the “root hog or die” position on things like Medicare and Social Security, fiery in its advocacy for radical individualism, leavened with a lot of sotto voce racism in its treatment of minorities, explicitly religious, and ripe with personal attacks and deliberate opprobrium with a casual regard for truth…this is basically the essence of Southern campaigning for the last century, almost from the moment the Democrats regained the whip hand in the states of the old Confederacy.
And this platform, this mission, this belief system – this is the basis for a campaign by a Mormon from Massachusetts and his Catholic running mate from Wisconsin. Two decades after a couple of guys from Arkansas and Tennessee brought us the New South Presidency, two candidates from the states of Kennedy and LaFollette and out to deliver the Old South version.
I was right. I was dead solid right and I nailed it exactly. The older I get, the better I was. I just hope I’m wrong about the other thing I thought twenty or twenty-five years ago.
Of which, as I say, more later.
4) Last but not least: this is a pick that was met with ecstasy on both sides. For the GOP, Paul Ryan is the 21st century Newt Gingrich: the big thinker whose ideas and genius will tear those filthy Democrats limb from limb. For the Democrats, the prospect of running against somebody who proposes to scuttle Medicare and Social Security, whose deficit-hawk bona fides curiously only appeared once Obama was inaugurated, who is on the record with his admiration for an avowed atheist and wealth-worshipper – the general consensus appears to be “PLEEEEEEEASE DON’T THROW ME IN THAT BRIAR PATCH”.
Romney may yet win this election. But if he doesn’t, there’s a good case to be made that he lost it this morning.