Ezra has a great post on the relationship between President Obama and Paul Ryan here, but he gets carried away near the end:

Putting the Ryan budget at the center of the 2012 election has the tactical benefit of forcing Republicans to defend an unpopular proposal; more important, it has the long-term strategic benefit of potentially discrediting the Ryan budget as a political document. Prior to Ryan joining the ticket, a Romney loss seemed likely to strengthen the Republican Party’s conservative wing, because the defeat would be blamed on Romney’s moderate past. Now, if the Romney-Ryan ticket loses, it will vindicate skeptics of the party’s rightward shift, potentially strengthening the party’s moderates. That could produce a more cooperative opposition for Obama to work with in a second term.

But if Obama loses, Republicans will have won the presidency with a mandate to enact a deeply conservative agenda. Left to his own devices, Romney might have been a relatively pragmatic and cautious president. Instead, the Obama administration’s three-year effort to enshrine the Ryan budget at the heart of the Republican Party would prove to have been a crucial push toward enacting that budget into law.

Nonsense. I’ve come to disagree with this whole dichotomy. In fact, I think Romney might well have shown some real political intelligence with the Ryan pick, though I think it’s still probably a net negative. Why have I changed my mind, you might ask?

Because my assumption, which I think was the same as Bill Kristol’s and all these guys’, was that a Ryan berth would automatically mean a harsh, ideological campaign. Romney would have no choice but to run as a, well, resolute entitlement-slasher. After all, Ryan has more power in the GOP than Romney, and so on. The one fact I didn’t anticipate was that Ryan has been entirely willing to adapt to Romney’s style: being intentionally vague about his intentions on Medicare and other topics and launching hypocritical attacks on Obama for cutting Medicare, for starters. This talk about a new ideological campaign has, to this point, proven to be mostly bunk. And you have to give Romney credit here for reading Ryan correctly. Ryan might well have been able to throw his weight around on the ticket, but Romney must have realized that Ryan would go with his program, just as he did with Bush’s during the Bush years, and for the same reason: to attain power. Ultimately, while throwing his weight around might make some difference, it would wear out its welcome quickly enough and, after all, Ryan is his #2. Without influence on Romney, Ryan would merely occupy an almost comically powerless role should the ticket win. He would, ultimately, be stupid to do so.

But the real credit has to be given to Romney’s read of the pro-Ryan activists too. These activists pushed for Ryan to be on the ticket because they wanted an ideological battle. They saw these two things as inseparable, as did everyone else, so all they had to do was push the first and they’d get the second. Since Romney knew Ryan and was able to read him, he realized he’d be able to get the first without having to have the second. And, for the moment anyway, it’s working. Romney’s enjoying a pretty small bounce, but more importantly I’m not hearing the Romney bitching that had become so frequent in the past couple of weeks among Republicans. Even Chuck Krauthammer is following the company line and going after Obama for cutting Medicare, in the exact same way that Ryan wants to do, and one would have to believe that attacking this with so much profile is going to make it awfully hard for them to turn around and go all vouchercare on the public. You know, in the same way that Obama’s attacks on McCain’s plan to end the employee tax deduction made it impossible to go after, and thus harder to find funds for HCR. Republicans don’t appear to realize that they got the running mate they wanted, but not the ideological battle they wanted, that their tactic was a success, but not the strategy. My guess is that, in a few weeks after the glow fades and the conventions end, the people who pushed Ryan will realize what happened and will be furious, and we’ll hear calls to “unmask Paul Ryan” and the like. One can only hope…

Which is not to say it’s a brilliant pick–Ryan’s plan is pretty darn unpopular, and I suspect the power of the message of downballot Dems running against Ryan will be strong enough to negate a bunch of ads attacking “spending” over a black and white picture of Obama. But maybe Mittens isn’t quite as dumb as we thought.