Well, perhaps the one remaining decision that could still sway the race is Romney's running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Many have criticized the choice as too dramatic. Noam Schieber, of the New Republic, was the most hysterical, writing that Romney's team chose Ryan knowing that Romney is too far behind to win, so they wanted to hang the loss as much on the party's conservative wing as it already it is on Romney's amorphous core. I'm not so optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on one's perspective). Romney is shrewd and careful, one reason why people don't like him much. And Ryan is young and attractive, and he puts Wisconsin in play, considering his relatively popularity there and the state's willingness to vote for an extreme but smooth conservative. Equally important, Ryan's unabashed, frightening conservatism is somewhat hard to understand. It involves changes to Medicare, budget assumptions and projections, revenue projections, and so on that aren't very easy for voters to understand or for political consultants to package into brief, effective jabs. But Obama's stimulus was $787 billion of government waste, taxes are rising, the government is spending more, and the economy isn't better -- or so the Romney campaign can quickly say. There are plenty of swing voters everywhere who think that Obama is a good person who hasn't fixed the economy after four years, even if Congress was stubborn, so it's time for the next candidate.
The most interesting development of Ryan's selection is that we may reach the end game of the past four, if not 30, years of conservatism. There's no moderate like Dole or McCain molded by years of compromise in the Senate and no "compassionate conservative" like George W. Bush. The ticket is very squarely defined by a Republican who has carefully articulated his policy remedy to the country's long-term fiscal problems so that it blows up the government compact of the past 80 years and draws the playing field anew deeply in favor of corporate entities and the wealthiest individuals. There's no question about it, though Ryan's humble personality does a good job making it all seem palatable. Voters can stare into the abyss this fall and jump in, or pull back, vote for Obama, and choose to solve it differently. Sure, with either option there will still be a Congress that could stop the gears, but voters will have profoundly spoken.
From that flows another end game: Should Romney lose, the Republican Party will conclude that its pattern of anointing relative moderates whose time has come is over, and in 2016, will nominate a Goldwater for our time. Then they'll lose in a breathtaking landslide and in 2020, the political hysteria of the past four years (which could possibly become another eight more) will finally be over.
