With Speech, Ryan May Have Helped Himself More Than Romney

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

TAMPA, Fla. â€" By every measure â€" the cheers in the hall, the praise from commentators across the country, the elation among aides to Mitt Romney â€" â€" the speech by Representative Paul D. Ryan accepting the vice-presidential nomination was a hit. He aggressively framed the campaign against President Obama, signaled that he, unlike some previous vice-presidential candidates, had no compunctions about leading the attack, and anchored Mr. Romney in a conservative school of thought that has come to define the Republican Party.

The question now is what it might mean for Mr. Romney's prospects of winning the White House. Could Mr. Ryan's speech to the Republican convention here ultimately be remembered as doing more good for Mr. Ryan, the young Republican congressman from Wisconsin making his first foray into national politics, than for Mr. Romney, the 65-year-old former governor of Massachusetts making his second, and potentially final, bid for the presidency?

There seems little doubt, delegates and analysts said, that Mr. Ryan served himself well on Wednesday night. After a tentative start, Mr. Ryan seemed in command of the room, drawing cheer after cheer as he made the Republican case against President Obama and presented the vision of greatly reduced government that he has championed on his rise to power in the House. At 42, several Republicans said, he cemented his stature â€" if he even needed to by now â€" as the leader of the generation of Republicans taking to the stage as Mr. Romney's generation begins its exit.

Mr. Romney is another question. History shows that with rare exceptions â€" Sarah Palin in 2008 â€" the choice of a vice-presidential nominee rarely has significant influence on the outcome of an election, and when it does, it is more likely to be a negative than a positive.

“Vice presidents often influence he election ,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican consultant. “And hardly ever in a positive way.”

Mr. Castellanos said that he thought that Mr. Ryan had passed that threshold of not being remembered as a negative, at least before Wednesday night. The stage might have changed a bit.

For one thing, Mr. Ryan's sheer stage presence â€" his cool command of the stage, his crisp and sunny delivery of attack lines, his endearing invocation of biography - has raised the stakes for Mr. Romney. Mr. Romney's political strengths have not, for the most part, included delivering the kind of speech that moves a hall or captures a television audience. And until now, he has avoided the intimately personal discussion of his background that was so prevalent in the Ryan speech â€" starting with the death of his father when he was 16. The line has been drawn.

Beyond that, although Democrats were quick to point out that Mr. Ryan glossed over â€" or in some cases, outright distorte d â€" many of the details of his views, particularly on the issues of Medicare and deficit reduction, he unambiguously tied the Romney-Ryan ticket to the Ryan budget wagon. He used the national stage of his convention speech to turn the Romney-Ryan campaign into a referendum on Mr. Ryan's program to revamp Medicare. If Mr. Romney had hoped to finesse differences between his Medicare views and those of his running-mate, as he hinted in the early days after announcing his choice of Mr. Ryan, that seems all the more difficult now.

Finally, after the initial glow over Mr. Ryan's speech, many of the statements he made have been challenged by independent fact-checkers, such as when he attacked President Obama for abandoning the deficit reduction proposals put forward National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform â€" even though he, as a member of the commission, voted against them. Democrats seem intent to use that and other examples to raise questions about Mr. R yan's credibility and character, which if successful could be something that spills over onto Mr. Romney as well.

Still, for all the attention paid to Mr. Ryan over the past few weeks â€" and the likelihood that he will draw more attention than most vice-presidential candidates â€" the contest will enter a new phrase as Mr. Romney takes the stage tonight. “The nominee is the big deal,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant who has advised Mr. Romney from time to time over the years. “A V.P. nominee can help at the edges but the great presidential campaign drama has only one true star.”