Two or three percentage points in a tight contest in a key battlefield state like Ohio or Florida can make all the difference of course, which is one of the reasons why Portman and Rubio are thought to have a better chance in the veepstakes than Christie from safely Democratic New Jersey. Portman's strengths are that he has held two cabinet-level posts, as US Trade Representative and director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is moderate but nonetheless popular among conservatives, speaks fluent Spanish, won his Cincinnati-area House seat with shares of the vote ranging between 70 and 77 per cent, and carried 82 out of Ohio's 88 counties when he ran for the Senate in 2010. Since no Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio, his attractions to Romney are obvious. 

Portman's negatives are, in the words of the Republican pollster Major Garrett, that's he's a middle-class white male who worked for George W. Bush and is therefore considered square, right-wing and boring. Garrett adds, however, that choosing him  would "tell the country that Romney's first big decision wasn't a gaffe-blown gamble or one festooned with the garish and outmoded trappings of regional or ideological balance". 

Picking Portman, another Ivy Leaguer who likes number-crunching, would expose the Republicans to the accusation of the ticket merely being "two boring white guys", but it would also further reassure those Americans who think the US is heading in the wrong direction — that the two people on the GOP ticket really understand the big economic issues facing America, in a way that fewer and fewer think is true of Obama and Biden. Nothing could underline Romney's message on the centrality of the economy to this election better than the    appointment of a former OMB director to his ticket. Not for nothing has the Wall Street Journal dubbed Portman "the un-Palin".