Mitt Romney Admits Own Weakness With Paul Ryan Pick

This type of analysis is driving the GOP narrative the past 48 hours.

By selecting Paul Ryan as his running mate on Saturday, Mitt Romney did something that Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, Al Gore, and John McCain did in previous presidential contests: They used their VP pick to try to shake things up. Trailing in the summer, they chose a running mate — be it Geraldine Ferraro, Jack Kemp, Joe Lieberman, or Sarah Palin — to change the fundamentals of the race. These picks all worked in the short run, but only once (with Lieberman) did it serve its purpose for the rest of the campaign. (Gore, after all, was able to battle back to where he actually won the popular vote.) So how will this play out for Romney? By picking Ryan, he made the calculation that he needed to pick someone to help redefine himself, first and foremost. The move also serves to fire up conservatives, give the GOP ticket a jolt of youthful energy, and make the case he now stands for something big. But it also wasn’t the kind of VP selection we saw from George W. Bush in 2000 or Barack Obama in 2008 that essentially said: “I’ve got this thing.” Instead, by picking Ryan, Romney said: “I need some help.”