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Justin Sullivan / Getty Images file
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney talks with senior adviser Beth Myers aboard his campaign plane before taking off Aug. 2 in Centennial, Colo.
WASHINGTON & JANESVILLE, Wisc. -- Mitt Romney's months-long vice presidential selection process came to a close one week ago in a dining room in suburban Massachusetts, where Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, dressed casually to avoid detection during commercial flights, told Romney he would accept the GOP candidate's offer to join the ticket.
For the Romney campaign, Ryan's meeting with Romney, in the dining room of chief vetter Beth Myers last Sunday, was the result of a process that began in April, and wound through several secrecy-cloaked months without major leaks before culminating in Saturday's rollout in Virginia.
Even the rollout was an example of both a flawlessly executed bit of secrecy and stagecraft and improvisation when events did not go as the campaign planned. Myers told reporters the Romney campaign originally planned to announce the pick Friday in New Hampshire, but with Ryan attending a memorial service for the victims of a shooting at a Sikh temple in his district, the plans were changed to Saturday.
All of this information was a closely guarded secret until Saturday night, when Myers, in charge of VP vetting, offered reporters a glimpse inside the process.
The Romney campaign kept its running mate a secret until Saturday morning, a strategy that yielded big fundraising dollars. NBC's Pete Alexander reports.
The vet
“I had one directive: The candidates must be qualified to take office on day one,” Myers said of her appointment to head the VP search on April 16. “Around May 1 we created a short list.”
Throughout the process, Myers said, one thing was clear: "This was Mitt’s decision.”
Myers chose not to disclose a full list of who was considered for the No. 2 spot, but many of the names have leaked out: former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio were vetted, as were Ohio Sen. Rob Portman and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. Portman and McDonnell received calls Friday night to inform them they were not the pick.
Myers told reporters she established a system, approved by Romney, to quietly vet candidates after asking if they were interested in the job. A team of lawyers worked with Myers in a secure room of the campaign's Boston headquarters. No copies were made of any documents, and everything was locked in a safe when the team left at night. No documents were allowed out of the room.
Romney tries to define Ryan before Democrats do
Included in the data collected by Myers and her team: congressional voting records, an exhaustive questionnaire and "several years" of tax returns -- she did not say how many. Romney has come under fire from Democrats and many in the media for his refusal to release more than two years of returns, despite reports he released several times that amount when he himself was vetted as a possible ticket-mate for John McCain in 2008.
Throughout May and June, Myers and her team pored over data, presenting information to Romney, who discussed his thinking with a small group of advisers, including the campaign manager, senior strategists and close aides. When the Romney campaign convened a retreat for top donors with major GOP figures in Utah in mid-June, Myers met with several contenders to clear up lingering issues and ask follow-up questions.
“He [Romney] talked with a lot of people,” Myers said, adding that she felt it was important to keep her own opinion to herself. “I did not share my thoughts on who I thought it should be”
The vetting of Ryan – or at least when he began to know about it -- lasted nearly six weeks. Just days before the June 5 gubernatorial recall election in the Badger State, the congressman’s staff started compiling hundreds of pages of documents to submit to the Romney campaign, such as public statements and op-ed pieces.
Ryan never let on publicly whether he was being vetted or not throughout the summer months. He always dismissed questions surrounding his VP possibilities. That, sources say, played into Ryan’s strategy: keep expectations of VP possibilities incredibly low and just be a team player.
On July 2, the day she was famously photographed in Wolfeboro, N.H., meeting with Romney on his back porch, Myers presented her boss with completed dossiers on the final candidates for him to absorb.
On Aug. 1, when Romney returned from his week-long foreign trip, he was ready to make a decision. He met with Myers in her office in Boston and placed a call to Ryan. Could they meet in person for a discussion?
The offer
By August, reporters had begun to whittle down the short list of possible candidates and to keep a close eye on the top contenders. Despite this, on Aug. 5, Ryan quietly slipped out of his home and, dressed casually and wearing a hat and sunglasses to obscure his appearance, drove to Chicago, where he boarded a flight to Hartford, Conn.
There, an unlikely emissary was waiting for him in a rented car: Myers’ 19-year-old son, Curt, who picked Ryan up and drove him from Hartford to Brookline, Mass., and his mother’s dining room, where Romney was waiting, having been driven down from Wolfeboro that morning by Secret Service agents.
Obama gets his target with pick of Ryan
Romney described the meeting to reporters traveling aboard his plane Saturday night.
"We talked about the campaign and how it would be run and talked about how we’d work together if we get the White House," Romney said. "What the relationship would be, how we’d interact and be involved in important decisions. But we talked about our families, what this meant for them, what kind of challenge it meant -- those are the topics we discussed.”
Ryan also met with a handful of top Romney staffers, and when Romney officially extended the offer to join the ticket, the seven-term congressman was thrilled, if not surprised.
"By the time we met in person I kind of knew it was going to happen, and I was very humbled," Ryan told reporters Saturday. "It was the biggest honor I’ve ever been given in my life.... I Love this country dearly, and I feel we have an opportunity to fix things once and for all."
When the shooting happened Sunday at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., Ryan handled the fallout from Massachusetts, never telling his staff exactly where he was. If it wasn’t for the unforeseen tragedy that took place in Wisconsin’s 1st District that day, Ryan’s staff likely never would have known their boss was out of state at all. He flew back that night, undetected.
The House Budget Committee chairman kept his schedule intact for the entire week leading up to the announcement including spending three days filming commercials for his congressional re-election campaign. Ryan never let out his secret to his campaign staffers, who were working 12-hour days with him on the ads. They will begin airing next month in his district – in Wisconsin, you can appear on the ballot as both a vice presidential candidate and running for a congressional seat.
Ryan spent the middle of the week traveling in northwest Wisconsin stumping for local candidates – all along knowing his life was about to change. But these long car rides gave him plenty of private time to speak with his longtime friend and chief of staff about his new role.
Escape from Wisconsin
Keeping the Romney/Ryan pairing a secret for the next week proved to be an Olympian challenge. A boomlet of support for the Ryan candidacy drew increased scrutiny, and reporters such as NBC's Alex Moe were staking out Ryan's home, chatting with the candidate and his family and keeping tabs on their movement, lest they slip away again undetected.
Myers said she thought Moe might be close to solving the mystery.
“She did a great job,” Myers said of Moe, whom Ryan likened to a family member in a recent interview. “We knew we had to be very diligent in throwing her off the scent.”
And diligent they were, moving Ryan's family undetected while he was attending the Friday memorial service. Ryan told reporters earlier in the week his family was planning a trip to Colorado, departing on Saturday, so packing seemed unremarkable.
Early Friday morning, the congressman’s trusted chief of staff, Andy Speth, arrived in his red pickup to take Ryan to the memorial service, with reporters in tow.
Ryan returned home in the early afternoon and went inside through the back as he was locked out of his side door, telling reporters who stood watching on the sidewalk he must have forgotten his keys. That would be the last time anyone saw the congressman in Janesville, because sometime after 3 p.m., he exited his home into the back yard (where reporters couldn’t see) and went into the woods.
"I grew up in those woods. The house I grew up in backs up to the house I live in, so I know those woods like the back of my hand. So it wasn’t too hard to walk through them. So I just went out my back door, went through the gully in the woods I grew up playing in. I walked past the tree that has my own tree fort I built back there," Ryan said.
Escaping via the woods isn’t something new for Ryan, either. It is a tactic the congressman has been forced to use before due to protesters in front of his house. Ryan is used to cutting through the bushes.
Waiting a couple of hundred yards on the other side: Speth, who took Ryan and his family to an airport in neighboring Illinois, where a private plane would whisk them to Virginia.
Back at the house, Ryan's sister-in-law, intentionally left behind, turned out the lights just as news was beginning to leak that Romney would announce his pick Saturday, turning the eyes of the world on the town of Janesville.
When Moe knocked on the congressman's door that night, after NBC News confirmed he would be the vice presidential nominee, no one answered. Ryan was already hundreds of miles away.
The rollout
While Ryan was on his way to meet once again with the man at the top of the ticket, Romney was busy on the phones, informing other candidates from the short list that they had not been chosen. Portman and McDonnell received calls that night and may not have been the only ones. Romney had already called Pawlenty, a tireless advocate for the nominee and a staff favorite, on Monday.
When the Ryans landed in Elizabeth City, N.C., an hour south of Norfolk, they were whisked away to a Fairfield Inn hotel -- again, by Myers' son Curt -- and met by a handful of top Romney aides. The family ate takeout from Applebee’s with Myers, and worked on speech prep. Then, Myers said, as the campaign sent out an advisory telling the world that Romney would announce his choice the next morning, Myers turned off her phone.
Ryan placed a phone call to his mother around midnight to let her know he was in fact being tapped as Romney’s right-hand man. He called his siblings the next morning just hours before he gave the biggest speech of his life.
Ryan and his family loaded into two cars for Norfolk first thing Saturday and were driven to the USS Wisconsin, the site of the announcement. The rest is history.
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http://www.thenation.com/blog/169285/paul-ryan-seriously#
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169285/paul-ryan-seriously#
I'm sure it was easy for someone like Romney, who is used to covering (hiding) his tracks *taxes...hard drives*
Under the Ryan budget, Romney would have paid an .82% tax rate compared to his 14.8% on the one tax return he showed us. YET 30% of the lower income earners would have their taxes RAISED! What more do you need to know about this duo??
The only thing we need to keep in mind suzi q is what flavor koolaid you bathe your tonsils in and what prevarication your god man BHO spews from his pie hole.
VOTE R&R
He kept the name of Ryan a secret because he was going to release it together with his tax returns but, no luck.
The name or Ryan is out, his taxes will remain a secret.
Convenientlies, I will vote R&R: Research and Repudiate.
Maybe Ryan was supposed to bring the tax returns with him...but he lost them during his romp in the woods?
What's the big mystery? Romney has experience keeping things secret....his tax returns, his swiss bank accounts, this caiman island accounts...next to them, keeping a VP choice secret was easy!
Yes gutter of prevarication standards
and the macaw from down low hows that sump pump smellin with all that troll urine in it ?
Vote R&R 2012 R&R 2020
Not that your post makes any sense; but, I am curious....who do you want for 2016?
Rank and file libs, not having listened to Ryan with an open mind, believe the cartoon version of him put out by the Obama team. But the campaign is long enough that unfiltered Ryan will go out around the country aplenty, and many people in the middle (and a few thousand libs, to boot) and with an open mind will be convinced.
Great call Gov. Romney!
They just won't be able to get their POLL numbers UP by election day.
Romney has the leadership skills and knowledge to RESTORE America to her greatness. Ryan has the leadership skills and knowledge to REPAIR what the Obnoxious Bully Aggressively Misleading America (Obama) has destroyed. The "bully" that you white liberals worship has failed. He has thrown America off the cliff and has betrayed everyone that supported him last time to include the Kennedys and Oprah. White liberal America is to blame for high unemployment, poverty, and the demise of America. You have betrayed your children and grand children.
So it was Mom who leaked the news Friday. cool!
You people amaze me!
Neither of these candidates are worth the attention!
If you like a lier with a communist agenda vote for Obama.
If you like the other lier with the opposite agenda then vote for Romney.
Does anyone CARE which one has the best interest of our United States in mind?
I'm going with Romney (at the moment) because I don't like the idea of government controlling my life to the point I would need to either work for it or be supported by it in order to survive. I'd rather make my own way in life, thank you!
IF HE COULD HAVE CHOSEN ANY WORSE...I DON'T KNOW HOW OR WHO!!!!! But he chose the Best VP pick for the RE Election of Obama/Biden!!
I'm going to give you two secrets about pro-choice. This is in case they try to needle you on the issue. One is: do you remember when legalized abortions started? That you might call Roe versus Wade? But the decision was made upon the "butchering" of back-alley abortions that led to deaths. Even in the Catholic Dictionary (1958 Marian Edition Bible / with Latin Vulgate and Greek Septuagint) it says abortions are legal if it's a threat to the woman's life. My girlfriend threatened to throw herself down a flight of stairs when she was pregnant, and end her life or miscarry, although she had attended Catholic School a short time earlier. I think she was ashamed of being pregnant out of wedlock or religiously abused. The second argument is with the nuns and health-care. Either or, pro-choice is a woman's issue, and for grown "men" to talk about it, is: perverted femininity! Back-alley abortions is going back to the "cave man" era! Based on experience and knowledge:
New Republican talking point: 1/3 of the population gets welfare.
Factcheck: 4.4 million people receive welfare benefits.
They had the last 3 standing draw straws a couple hours before the announcement, that was the secret. Ryan will do OK after losing both the bid and the House seat this fall, he can make movies and shows with Palin. Heck Hustler will probably add him to the cast in Who's Nailin' Paylin and have some love scenes between the two VP repub candidates, they always have backup plans to get rich the Repubs do, even if it is in TV BS shows business.
Seriously, doesn't the possibility of having a president who has overseas accounts scare anyone? It's those types of accounts that are used for illegal/shady activities. If a man does not deem his own country to be a viable place for his finances, should he be allowed to hold a position which grants him the power to affect millions of people financially? I hope this makes sense to you.
Mitt the twit, can't get anything right.
We have a "conflict of interest" here. Mitt Romney from his liturgy, paraphrases The Bible like Kay Arthur quoted scripture from the Bible "to remember my people, Israel." The Catholic Church fights for a Palestinian State, and believes in the multi-cultural Palestine, as Aramaic. So which argument is right? The Bible (Kay Arthur) or The Catholic Church. If majority rules and there are a billion Catholics, we would be expected to choose the Catholic Church wandering from scripture. Meaning Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are a house divided.
Its been a really increadible weekend for me. I got to see Romney and Ryan in Manassas, Virginia where overload crowd of 11,000 supporters showed up to what was thought would be a 4,000 person event... The one thing that stands out in my mind tonight is that we are going to win this election for the simple reason that all Romney and Ryan have to do is tell the truth and stick to the issues.
I read the posts from the liberals and all they have is conjecture and unfounded lies and distortions about our candidates. They really have nothing factual on the real issues that they can attack without distorting the truth or slinging mud at two exceptional men who are out to turn this country around. They are not liars. They are honorable men. The axiom that time always allows thruth to prevail applies here I believe. In the end, Democrats can distort, lie, divert and run, but they can't run from the truth or hide from the real issues for the next 86 days...
I'm confident we'll have a new President come January and I'm just as confident we gain the majority in the Senate... There is somthing so reassuring in knowing right and truth are on your side...
ROMNEY/RYAN 2012!!!! Leadership for a CHANGE!!! YEAH BABY!!!
Goodnight All...
Gee, if the Romney staff can keep the VP vetting quiet for months, the perhaps a ROMNEY WHITE HOUSE can keep NATIONAL SECURITY SECRETS from leaking out to the press and our enemies. Won't that be refreshing. Obama's White House and staff are like a sieve.
What is so "special" about Paul Ryan being Catholic and Vatican I and Vatican II dogma. Is not the Pope German and belonged to the Nazi Youth League. World War II was not only fought by Germany, but by Italy and Japan in the Evil Axis Powers. Give me some feedback ye Israelites of thee atrocities of Rome or The Catholic Church. This is Paul Ryan with the recent "skinhead" murders in Wisconsin by Wade Michael Page and the Sikhs, or White Supremacy, bred in Wisconsin. There are other issues in the Catholic Church, such as sexual abuses, that the Pope takes no responsibility for, when: "The Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." If the Pope won't lay down his life for the sheep... how do you expect him too for the lambs. There are just as many Southern Baptists in America, as there are Catholics, as said Bill Clinton is Southern Baptist. Which brings me to Vietnam, and more Southern Baptists were drafted "to thin the herd" for Catholics to rule religion in America. Did you know both South Vietnam and North Vietnam were Christian? "Elias, down there" look to the left "Catholic Missionary Church." in North Vietnam. If you look at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC you'll find more dead Southern Baptists names written on the Memorial. A fake war to kill Southern Baptists. God Bless!
Over 100 million in USA and 36% of all illegal aliens now on some form of public welfare.
Hussein has overseen the largest expansion of welfare, foodstamps, unemployment, medicaid, anchor babies for illegals, free healthcare, free lunch, free condoms in the history of our country.
Bankrupting future generations who will NEVER be able to pay the debt of his entitlement programs turned into virtual HAMMOCKS!
Over 100 million now on some form of the dole sucking at the government tit with few taxpayers left. 45% paying NO TAX at ALL. Just sucking!
Bye Bye OBummer 2012!
jello heads!
"getoverit"....you are a disgrace to your FAITH,....actually you have NO FAITH. You are selfish and TYPICAL DEMOCRAT, you should be ashamed of your selfish self. I will never, ever, ever vote for a Communist, Socialist, Marxist, Muslem pro-queer that has NEVER written a budget. I do believe the other side has written at least 4 EACH. By the way, the pedophile Harry Reid has never written a budget either. What a joke,....let's see how far the American people have gone. I'm sure NBC is going to do everything they can to get OFF the economy issue. But, it IS the economy,..........STUPID. Are you better off than you were in 2008 ? Bet you weren't.