Romney-Ryan

Random Romney-Ryan thoughts: Hey a Hogwarts alliterative ticket! They can just use that big ribbon R and add the "YAN" and the "EPUBLICAN" in small print below. If I'm counting right this is the first alliterative ticket since the Democratic Stevenson-Sparkman slate in 1952.

Also first sitting House member since Geraldine Ferraro, and first Cheesehead on a national ticket ever, if you don't count Fightin' Bob LaFollette's independent run in 1924 or Pat Lucey as John Anderson's running mate in `80. Still, if Wisconsin's finally on a national ticket, wish it'd been Russ Finegold instead.

Wisconsin is not just a nativist observation on my part: by going to Wisconsin Mitt taps in, peripherally, to the Scott Walker zeitgeist. Not sure if that helps in the highly polarized Badger state itself, but it helps with the base.

Which of course is what this is all about. After six straight years of running for president, Mitt Romney has not yet won the trust of the base and still needed someone to shore it up.  Ryan fires up the tea partiers, but risks a lot of old people in Florida worried about their Medicare. The president likes to say this a choice between two very different directions, and Mitt Romney has just underscored that. This election just got even more polarized, if you can imagine that.