@theev,
Not only is Crane way out there in right field, he was also a closet alcoholic with not a lot of legislative or personal substance. He could charm a small room of New Right donors, but getting in the race in 1980 was part vanity project, part "keeping Reagan honest" because before the retrospective hagiographies of St. Ronnie, the New Right were both madly in love with Reagan and scared that if the last people in the room to talk to him were moderates he'd move to the middle. There's always Ashbrook but he's somewhat scarier, as basically a smart Crane with lots of shady ties (like friendships with some of the Italian neofascist organizations that were blowing up public squares and trains in the Seventies) that would just buy trouble from a Democratic ad campaign. I would guess there are three major possibilities in a non-Ron scenario:
1) Ford does a Grover Cleveland. It is as some posters above mentioned a possibility, and it would be the same sort of "Buyer's Remorse" ticket that came up in another thread recently about Humphrey and McGovern for '76 (in a world where The Hump, God bless him, wasn't between serious and fatal bouts of bladder cancer respectively.) In that case, or in the case that it's Ford-by-proxy via HW Bush (I've always liked referring to Poppy's presidency as "Gerald Ford's second term") I'd say two strong VP possibilities are Jack Kemp (socially... complex on the issues, but a hardened supply-sider and a pretty boy of the New Right despite his empathy for the poor) and Paul Laxalt (Reagan's best friend in Congress and a rock-ribbed Western right-winger, which would unify the Western and Midwestern wings of the party that were, at the time, its strongest.)
2) John Connally does a Mitt Romney. Connally was something of the Muskie of the '80 cycle before NH when people realized a Reagan comeback was very real. He had tremendous money, a larger-than-life personality, a long resume despite his party switching, and the tacit backing of the Nixonite machinery as Tricky Dick's old favorite (Nixon did like him some charismatic manly-men, at least in part due to envy.) He also had a lot of establishment consensus around him as a strong candidate, just the kind of thing that can break like a glass jaw against a smart challenger with a voter base, but also the kind of thing that can steamroll a mediocre field (like Romney the younger in 2012.) In that case I could still see him going with Kemp for telegenic youth and regional difference, or with someone like Bill Milliken, the longtime Rockefeller Republican governor of Michigan.
3) Jack Kemp does a Kennedy/Obama. Kemp was a young representative with a thin resume, but he had a great head of hair (don't knock it, that and Grecian Formula worked for Reagan), a winning smile, a name to conjure with (his middle initial was even F, "Time For Another JFK" anyone?), and a Dubya Bush-like combination of right-wing orthodoxy on many issues and a few touches of "compassionate conservatism" for undecided voters. The trouble with Kemp, as shown in his brief '88 bid, was that he was notoriously undisciplined on the campaign trail. But if the likes of John Sears or Richard Viguerie got hold of him and read him the riot act, he might be able to get past a field of folks too far left for the 1980 Republican primary voters (see Howard Baker) or too obscure (see Phil Crane) or too straight-up sketch (see John Connally) to stop him. He's going to want an elder-statesman type for VP but not one that overshadows him, so there's really some range from which to choose there. Hell, he might even go for HW Bush on "not overshadowing" grounds.