The Bain Drain

"It's the Brain Drain.  His brain's draining."

Help!
A film by Richard Lester, starring the Beatles

There's the complaint--and there's probably a book about it--that the U.S. lost at least a generation of the best and brightest to Wall Street, the big banks and other financial manipulators, because that's where all the action and the big money was.

Back in the 60s, something like this was called the Brain Drain.  I first heard it in connection with European and especially British scientists drawn to America (and so the above quote is appropriately from a British movie directed by an expat American.) Such a brain drain from, say, the higher reaches of politics to more sumptuous occupations might help explain the otherwise baffling ineptitude of the Romney campaign. 

We don't have to reprise the devastating last few months but just the past day or two.  Romney picks Ryan, with more than two weeks until the GOPer convention, which gives the media and the Democrats all that time to dissect and define Ryan with no other distractions.  They make a joint appearance--i.e. photo op--in which Ryan is introduced to the American public wearing a suit coat at least a size too large for him, which appears to be Romney's.  These two guys, with no military service or foreign policy experience, use a decommissioned Navy ship as their backdrop in Virginia, where neither is from (though it is at least a swing state.) 

Then Ryan goes off to an Iowa state fair where he's hit immediately with a question from the crowd on what he's going to do about Medicare, his greatest vulnerability, and he simply refuses to answer.  Meanwhile Romney waffles on his support for the Ryan budget.  But in the dumbest move and the easiest to have anticipated and avoided was Romney's next stop: Florida.  If there is any state of the union where Ryan's attack on the existence of Medicare is going to be a huge issue, it's Florida--and most of the newspapers there immediately headlined that problem.  Just as Romney was in the state.

But that's where Romney went--and wound up cancelling his appearance in Orlando, which should be good territory for him.  With a lame excuse, on which his staff flipflopped.  Then he goes off to Miami for an appearance hosted by a felon convicted of cocaine trafficking--who under Florida law, can't lawfully vote.

Karl Rove, aka Bush's Brain, may still be the evil genius of GOPer politics, but there doesn't seem to be much beyond that.  But the theory that the GOPer brain drain is really a Bain Drain runs up against the fact that the candidate himself is a money guy, and he doesn't seem to be any better or smarter at this than his staff.

On the other hand, there is a large lump of evidence that the Bain Drain is what it's all about.  As the latest fundraising letter from Jim Messina of the Obama campaign says: "Here's the calculation: Mitt Romney doesn't need or expect Paul Ryan to convince even one undecided voter to cast their ballot for him. That's not what he's on the ticket for. He's there to reassure and inspire ultraconservative ideologues and corporate interests that they will have one of their own a heartbeat from the presidency.

That means tens or even hundreds of millions more dollars for the Romney campaign and the array of outside groups supporting him -- and if current trends hold, more than 90 percent of that money will be spent on TV ads -- lying, distorting and trashing Barack Obama. Those ads will have more impact on undecided voters than anything Paul Ryan himself does or says.

Mitt Romney is convinced that picking Paul Ryan is a great investment for him. "

Apart from the obvious utility of this theory in getting Obama donors to give more, it is almost the only theory that makes sense. (Reuters sort of thinks so too.)  Because it suggests that Romney's strategy has not changed.  The only thing he's done well in this campaign so far (as I've pointed out ) is raise tons of money.  He may have begun to feel that as the polls showed him in free-fall,  the well was going to dry up, and the Ryan pick was the pick-me-up his fundraising needed.  That's the investment guy--the Bain Brain's thinking.

So the strategy may remain the same. If it is intact we can expect a nondescript convention speech, a soundbite or two for the debates, and more inept campaigning.  But a thermonuclear onslaught of negative ads that Romney is banking on to make enormous changes at the last minute.

Update: The New York Times and several other news outlets noted that Ryan is particularly well connected to big conservative donors--and to make that point himself, Ryan paid court in Las Vegas Tuesday to crypto-billionaire Sheldon Addledson.