Romney set to announce running mate Saturday: Here's the short list

5. Paul Ryan

J. Scott Applewhite/AP
House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, in this recent photo, as the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing on the implications of the Supreme Court's ruling that the individual mandate in the "Affordable Care Act" is constitutional.

Assets: House Budget Committee chairman. Wunderkind first elected to Congress in his 20s, now in seventh term. Seen as intellectual leader of Republican Party. Energizes conservative base. Good rapport with Romney. Lost his father as a teenager, giving him hard-luck family story that Romney lacks. Hails from Wisconsin, a battleground state.

Negatives: Budget plan to cut government spending and reform entitlements scares some voters, Team Obama would fan flames of fear over his plan. Still on the young side (early 40s). Can get wonky and esoteric on the stump.  

5 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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