Detours and disguises on Romney trail

IT WAS a scene more fitting for a whodunit mystery than a vice-presidential roll-out.

US house budget committee chairman Paul Ryan — determined not to be seen as he began making his way from his Wisconsin home to the Norfolk, Virginia, battleship where he would be named Mitt Romney’s running mate — left through the back door of his house on Aug 10 and crept into the woods that led to his boyhood home.

On the other side, he met an aide who would sneak him to a small airport for a flight that would begin an adventure he says is still “going from the surreal to the real”.

Romney, 65, seeking a game- changing running mate, has named Irish-American Ryan, 42, as the other half of what his campaign is calling “America’s comeback team”.

Until the last moments, he and his staff were determined to keep his months-long quest for a No 2 under wraps and his final choice secret. At a hangar at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on Saturday, Romney’s top aide, Beth Myers, described the deliberations and sometimes cloak-and-dagger tactics they used to pull it off. At the start of the four-month process, Romney gave search chief Myers one simple directive, she said: “That the candidates must be qualified to take office on day one.”

Choosing among the contenders — and then hiding the pick from a frenzied press corps and the public — was more complicated.

Ryan’s forest detour wasn’t the first time he had taken pains to avoid being spotted, according to Myers’s account. After Romney decided on Aug 1 that Ryan was his choice and phoned the Wisconsin politician to invite him to Massachusetts for a meeting, Ryan donned a casual shirt, jeans, a baseball cap, and sunglasses to ensure he wasn’t recognised en route from Chicago to a small airport in Hartford, Connecticut.

While Romney had yet to offer him the post, the seven-term congressman had a hunch what was in store. “By the time we met in person, I kind of knew it was going to happen, and I was deeply humbled. It was the biggest honour I’ve ever been given in my life.”

It was in Myers’s dining room on Aug 5 that Romney and Ryan had a chance to talk about how their pairing would work. The conversation was the culmination of an arduous process that began in April, when Romney’s senior aides put together briefings on a broad group of possible vice-presidential candidates. Myers recruited a group of volunteer attorneys to vet them.

Among the files collected from Ryan were several years of tax returns, Myers said. That means Romney had access to more of Ryan’s tax records than the public has had to those of the presidential candidate himself. Romney released his 2010 tax return and has promised to provide his 2011 filing when it’s available, yet has resisted calls to disclose prior years’ information.

After Romney’s meeting with Ryan on Aug 5, word reached Myers of the shooting at a Sikh temple in Ryan’s district — an event that would throw off the planned timing of the team’s roll-out. Originally slated for Aug 10 in New Hampshire, the announcement was moved to Saturday after a memorial service for the Sikh victims was scheduled for that day.

On Friday, Ryan flew with his family to Elizabeth City, Virginia, and at a hotel, top aides prepared him for his speech. The campaign distributed an advisory late on Friday, saying that Romney would announce his choice the next morning on the USS Wisconsin, further feeding the speculation around Ryan.

The official announcement came the way Romney’s team had always promised it would — through a social media application it had announced weeks earlier. Then the campaign issued a news release and about two hours later, Ryan bounded off of the bunting-adorned battleship and joined Romney for the first time as his running mate.

“Big day,” Romney told reporters later. “It’s now two-on-two instead of two-on-one.”