Adieu, Paul Ryan

I'm amazed that so many people seem to think Paul Ryan still has a future in politics. As the MSNBC commentators noted last night his contribution to the campaign was a big, fat zero, and since he couldn't even carry his home state Romney might have been better off with Rob Portman to help tip the scales in the all-important Ohio.

Ryan's serial mendacity on the campaign trail before his handlers enforced a virtual media blackout should have completely discredited his claims to be a serious expert on anything, even though Paul Krugman had long since unmasked him as a fraud.

Unsuccessful vice presidential candidates as a rule have not had great post-election careers in recent times. The only example I could find in the past century of a losing VP nominee coming back to win high political office was a guy named Franklin Roosevelt, who at 38 was the running mate with James Cox in an election that they lost to Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. This was before he was struck with the paralytic illness diagnosed as polio in 1921 and before his election as governor of New York in 1928.

But honestly I can't see Paul Ryan as a Franklin Roosevelt. If a much more formidable thinker and politician like Jack Kemp went nowhere after losing a national election, I don't see how Ryan will muster support for a new national campaign. The Republicans are going to have to tack more to the center represented by Chris Christie and the diversity represented by Marco Rubio.

I'm betting Ryan will even have trouble as Budget Committee chairman. He will be faced with the dilemma either of maintaining his reputation as a principled deficit hawk or heeding his baldfaced campaign lie that he is bipartisan. No prizes for guessing which way he will go, but it will definitively put the lie to any bipartisan pretensions.

In general, I expect a backlash in the Republican Party to a campaign based on lies. If the party has any hope for the future it will have to break the grip of the Roves and Norquists and find its way to the center with a good deal more integrity than it has shown in recent years. Again, for all the serious reservations I have about Christie, he seems well-positioned to lead the party in this direction.