I may find out if Pawlenty is the running mate today...

[Mr. Morden]

Ridge was both an excellent student and a local start of high school athletics.  Tim Pawlenty never made it past JV on his high school hockey team.

OMG!  Tim Pawlenty: Not up to playing varsity level hockey -- not up to handling the nuclear launch codes.

[Mr. Morden]

I wouldn't deny that Ridge brings some assets or that you can make a lengthy list of reasons why Ridge should be the guy.  But you can't just tally up the number of reasons in favor of Ridge and compare against the number of reasons against.  Some reasons are a lot more important than others.  And some people view these reasons against Ridge as being dealbreakers:

1) pro-choice on abortion (And the problem isn't just that X number of people would vote for him on that basis and Y number of people against.  The bigger issue is just that it could lead to intra-party civil war, and the spectacle of that would present a huge PR nightmare for McCain....which he could easily just avoid by picking someone else.)

2) prominent member of the Bush administration for 3+ years

3) didn't exactly get sterling reviews while in that job while in the Bush administration

I still maintain that if McCain thinks he can get away with picking a pro-choicer, he might as well go the distance on that and pick a woman.

[Mr. Morden]

Btw, here's a Bloggingheads clip in which (left of center) Noam Scheiber makes a decent case for Pawlenty (and implicitly, against Romney) on "relatability to the average Joe" grounds:

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/13386?in=05:55&out=09:51

[Mr. Morden]

Sorry but Romney clearly hurts more than he helps. How that is not clear to you is beyond me.

Why and where?  Yes, a Mormon hurts in some areas, but those areas will still go for McCain.

Lol.  How is this even a question?  Have I wandered into an alternate universe in which Romney is popular?  Read the discussion in this thread:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=81427.0

We just got through a primary race in which he largely appealed to rich people, Mormons, and conservatives who latched onto the only viable alternative to McCain they had available.  (Almost all of those people are going to vote for McCain in the GE anyway.)  Romney was consistently getting massacred in head-to-head polls against Clinton and Obama by double digits.  The guy is unpopular with swing voters.  The main media meme about him is that he's an inauthentic flip-flopper.  I don't see that changing anytime soon.

[Mr. Morden]

Romney doesn't help enough in Michigan to carry it... not by a long shot.  He might know people there, but they are the wrong crowd to appeal to.  The people Ridge knows in PA and Ohio are grassroots types, who are real Reagan Democrats, Hillary voters, and would be enticed to come out of us if Ridge is on the ticket.  The only way we don't win PA with ridge is if McCain himself proves to be too unpalatable for voters here... and if Ridge is a move to the center, then good.  McCain has swung so far to the right now to risk being unpalatable to the country as a whole.  We need to play to the middle.  As go those other states... if we absolutely need Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire to win, then this thing is already over.  That's barely a third as many EV's as Ridge assists us with.

"Wrong crowd to appeal to", I don't even know what that means.

And the Romney name won Michigan in the primaries, so...

He won with about 39% of the vote in what was basically a 3-way race (only McCain, Romney, and Huckabee really contested the state).  And he outspent both McCain and Huckabee by about 3 or 4 to 1.  And of course this was a GOP primary, not a general election.  And according to exit polls, in pretty much every state (including MI), McCain cleaned up with self described moderates and GE swing voters, whereas Romney did better with GOP stalwarts....who are probably going to vote for McCain in the general election anyway.  I'd like to see evidence that Romney is actually popular with Michigan swing voters.