Rep. Paul Ryan gets his 15 minutes of VP love

Sorry, Paul. Not this time. 

The National Review is reporting that Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the Budget Committee chairman, is being vetted by the Romney campaign for the VP slot. The report ads that some top Republican officials are wary of "plucking him from the House, where he is the party's most influential voice on fiscal issues."

Of course, there would be another rather significant reason for not picking him, as Outside the Beltway observes:

Given Ryan’s popularity among the Republican base, it’s not surprising that the Romney campaign would let it leak that they are considering him. At the same time, though, Ryan’s association with a budget that isn’t necessarily popular among the independent voters that Romney will need to attract in swing states is an argument for not selecting him.

Hell, let's not dance around this thing. Paul Ryan's budget plan is so unpopular that, as Jonathan Bernstein at The Plum states, Republicans with the exception of Mitt Romney are running from it.

In describing a new ad in the Montana Senate race being run by the Republican candidate Denny Rehberg, Bernstein writes:

The big news here is that Rehberg is campaigning against the House Republican budget, specifically over its threat to Medicare. Rehberg is one of a relatively small group of House Republicans who opposed the Ryan budget. The big question in House races, of course, is what price all of those Members who voted with Ryan will pay, if any.

Of 16 Republican candidates most likely to become new Senators in 2013, only 2 touted the Ryan budget on their web pages. None of them went as far as Rehberg now has gone in specifically denouncing it, but clearly there’s no eagerness to climb about the Ryan train, either because they think it’s bad policy or, more likely, because it polls badly, even in red states such as Missouri, Arizona, and even Nebraska, where nominee Deb Fischer is silent about it.

Yes, turning Medicare into a voucher program still polls badly. What that means is that Romney is giving Ryan a little love by considering him because Ryan is popular with the base, but he's not getting the gig. It would be a far too distracting choice and Romney doesn't need the election to be a referendum on privatizing Medicare. It's not going to happen.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)