This is silly, Portman would be a horrible pick. He was in charge of Bush's budget office for only a single year, yet the national debt raised half a trillion dollars under his watch.
Dems keep trying to make hay from associations like that but it never works.
I'm not trying to look at this through a partisan lens, but instead from the point of view of Romney's campaign and whether a pick strategically makes sense for them. If Romney is going to win, he's going to need to focus like a laser on Obama's economic failures; given that plenty of swing voters are still partially blaming Bush for things, it's very detrimental for Romney to have a running mate that held a cabinet-level position supervising Bush's budget, as it essentially hands Obama a new line of attack to define Portman negatively, attack Romney, and directly connect him to Bush.
Besides, especially with the deficit thing, it opens the possibility to attack ads that would say something to the effect of,
"Romney claims he wants to reduce the national debt, but his Vice Presidential nominee created a budget for George W. Bush that included an unprecedented deficit of over half a trillion dollars. Can we trust Mitt Romney's judgement with our economy?"
Something more polished and to-the-point, of course, but you get the gist. Of course there are plenty of counter-arguments to be made and everything but certainly Romney would rather avoid making his opponent's narrative any easier to build.
