6. Ryan seals the deal for a base-motivating campaign in the worst tradition of the Republicans. Republicans win when they run to their base, and play the "us versus them" card for their anxious constituencies. Voter suppression tactics of all sorts are in play, especially in Florida and Pennsylvania. Taken together, Ryan's earnest demeanor and brutal budgets act as an a elixir for grassroots conservatives; the base will now be super-motivated.

Bush won two terms without winning the majority of the popular vote because the GOP wanted the win more than the Democrats -- and Republicans cheat more. As Thomas Schaller writes at Salon: "By picking [Ryan], Romney provides a powerful signal that he is willing to counter Obama's failed attempt to unite America with an unapologetic attempt to win via econo-demographic divide and conquer politics."

7. The Romney campaign will now be the most brutal, race-tinged, fact-absent, expensive, technologically-sophisticated campaign ever run. This presidential race is increasingly polarized. Polling shows that Obama has lost most of the non-college-educated white male voters he was able to capture in 2008. As Charles Blow points out in the New York Times: "A staggering 90 per cent of Romney supporters are white. Only four per cent are Hispanic, less than one per cent are black and another four per cent are another race."

And of uncommitted "swing" voters, Blow writes: "Nearly three out of four are white. The rest are roughly eight per cent blacks Hispanics and another race."

Schaller adds: "Don't be surprised in the Romney-Ryan ticket engages in the sort of racially tinged, generationally loaded entitlement politics practiced by the Tea Party...."

8. While the VP pick isn't going to change the minds of many independent or hard-core party voters, it is a move to bring all elements of the party in sync. Progressive pundits, just a few days ago, were saying: Oh, the VP pick doesn't make much difference ... maybe, at best, a two per cent swing. Today is apparently a new day, and progressives are pouncing on this choice as being a huge plus for Obama. Well, you can't have it both ways. Republican wins are always about turning out the base to the polls. Ryan probably won't make that much difference on the large scale, but he becomes the thunderbolt to rouse the base, which appears to love him, even if he is a media-created fraud. In fact, Ryan may be the most effective political phony in America.

9. Repeat: Paul Ryan is the most effective phony in American politics today. When Romney picked Ryan, he was grabbing one of the great teflon politicians of all time. Ryan has a tremendous ability to appear earnest while lying through his teeth, as he did recently when he repeated Romney's lie about Obama and welfare work requirements. Ryan represents what Salon's Joan Walsh calls the "fakery at the heart of the Republican project today." She adds: "[Ryan,] the man who who wants to make the world safe for swashbuckling, risk-taking capitalists, hasn't spent a day at economic risk in his life."

Guys like Ryan "somehow become the political face of the white working class when they never spent a day in that class in their life," writes Walsh. He has, she says, a "remarkable ability to tap into the economic anxiety of working class whites and steer it toward paranoia that their troubles are the fault of other people -- the slackers and the moochers, Ayn Rand's famous 'parasites'...."

10. The Conservative tribe is now ready to fight all of its enemies. The conservatives and Republicans know what team they are on -- and that tribal identity is more important to them than any idea of hegemonic cultural identity could possibly be to liberals. For one, the conservative team is almost totally white, and far more homogenous, while more than 43 per cent of Obama's supporters are people of colour. Add in that conservative brand of resentment -- the "makers versus the takers" -- and it becomes clear who represents the conservative notion of a "maker." With Ryan as the standard-bearer for the self-described "makers," the team has its galvanizer.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haight and his researchers have compiled a catalogue of "six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity." Among them, he finds that group loyalty and identification is important among conservatives, but not among liberals. As William Saletan describes Haidt's thesis in the New York Times Book Review:

"Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order -- these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt's analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression."

Come election time, that array of values makes the Republican project more formidable. It is why, when conservative ideas are not popular, when significant majorities of Americans disagree with conservatives, they still have enormous capacity to exercise outsized influence, controlling much of the public debate -- and are on the doorstep of winning control of all three branches of government. Despite their minority status, the tribal thing still leverages far more power than is fair or many thought possible.

In the end, it doesn't really matter whether Romney picked Ryan out of desperation, or may have had to take Ryan as a deal for support from the Kochs, or may have felt Ryan was actually the best man for the job. Whatever the reason, the Ryan pick does a whole lot for the Romney campaign -- conferring money, authority, media attention, change of tone and more. Probably the most overarching plus, though, is that by adding Ryan, Romney has brought the whole Republican-conservative tribal deal together, which, from my vantage point only increases -- not decreases -- the chance of the Republicans defeating Obama in November.