“Ryan Shrugged”: Paul Ryan Suddenly Does Not Embrace Ayn Rand’s Teachings
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) tried to send the message this week that, contrary to “urban legend,”he is not obsessed with philosopher and author Ayn Rand.
“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan told National Review on Thursday. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”
Best known for her novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand advocated a philosophy that emphasizes the individual over the collective, and viewed capitalism as the only system truly based on the protection of the individual. She has been a significant influence on libertarians and conservatives.
Ryan, whose name has been floated as a possible running mate for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, appeared to be distancing himself from Rand in response to a public letter he received this week from nearly 90 faculty and administrators at Georgetown University. In their letter, they criticize him for misusing Catholic social teaching in defending his budget, which hurts the poor by proposing significant cuts to anti-hunger programs, slashing Pell Grants for low-income students and calling for a replacement of Medicare with a voucher-like system. They also invoke Rand’s name.
“As scholars, we want to join the Catholic bishops in pointing out that his budget has a devastating impact on programs for the poor,” said Jesuit Father Thomas J. Reese, one of the organizers of the letter. “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”
But any urban legend about Ryan’s affinity for Rand surely started with Ryan himself, who, prior to this week, had no qualms about gushing about Rand’s influence on his guiding principles.
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said during a 2005 event honoring Rand in Washington, D.C., the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in April 2009.
During the 2005 gathering, Ryan told the audience, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill … is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict — individualism versus collectivism.” The event was hosted by The Atlas Society, which prominently features a photo of Rand on its website and describes itself as a group that “promotes open Objectivism: the philosophy of reason, achievement, individualism, and freedom.”
Ryan also said during a 2003 interview with the Weekly Standard, “I give out ‘Atlas Shrugged’ as Christmas presents, and I make all my interns read it. Well … I try to make my interns read it.” He noted that he “looked into” Rand’s work when he was younger, but reiterated that he is a Christian and reads the Bible often.
In 2009, Ryan posted two videos on his Facebook page raving about the importance of Rand’s views.
“If ‘Atlas Shrugged’ author Ayn Rand were alive today, here’s the urgent message I think she’d be conveying,” Ryan wrote alongside the first video, titled “Ayn Rand’s relevance in 2009.”
He says in the video:
What’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build the moral case for capitalism. And that morality of capitalism is under assault. And we are going to replace it with a crony capitalism, collectivist, government-run system which is creeping its way into government. And so if Ayn Rand were here today, I think she would do a great job in showing us just how wrong what government is doing is. Not the quantitative analysis, not the numbers, but the morality of what is wrong with what government is doing today.
In the second video, titled “Ayn Rand & 2009 America, Part 2,” Ryan says it doesn’t surprise him that sales of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” have “surged” since President Barack Obama took office.
“It’s that kind of thinking, that kind of writing, that is sorely needed right now. And I think a lot of people would observe that we are living in an Ayn Rand novel right now, metaphorically speaking,” Ryan says. “The attack on Democratic capitalism, on individualism and freedom in America is an attack on the moral foundation of America. And Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism. This, to me, is what matters most.”
Some of Ryan’s critics took a shot at him for suddenly distancing himself from Rand.
“Not pure enough on entitlement cuts @philipaklein @robertcostaNRO Paul Ryan on Ayn Rand: ‘I reject her philosophy,'” Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, tweeted Thursday.
UPDATE: 5:14 p.m. — Ryan spokesman Kevin Seifert downplayed the lawmaker’s apparent change of tune on Rand.
“I wouldn’t make too much of this one way or another. Congressman Ryan was not ‘distancing himself’ from Rand, merely correcting several false storylines that are out there, such as the myth that he requires all of his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged. Saying he ‘rejects Ayn Rand’s philosophy’ was simply meant to correct a popular falsehood that Congressman Ryan is an Objectivist — he isn’t now and never claimed to be,” Seifert said in a statement to The Huffington Post.
By: Jennifer Bendery, The Huffington Post, April 27, 2012
“In The Rearview Mirror”: GOP Already Backseat Driving Romney Campaign
It seems awfully early in the campaign for campaign-strategy kibitzing, but Republicans are already leaning into the front seat to tell Mitt Romney what he should be doing differently. The New York Times reports on a host of Republicans fretting over the “angry tenor” of Romney’s campaign. Likewise, the Wall Street Journal editorial page urges Romney to be more positive. (And also, um, more mean: “One of Mr. Romney’s trickiest challenges will be how to handle Mr. Obama’s, er, veracity. … Mr. Romney can’t let the President get away with this.”)
Campaign backseat driving, as a rule, tends to be crap. There is a grain of truth here. In any incumbent election, voters tend to have pretty firm opinions about the incumbent. The campaign dynamic therefore hinges largely on the acceptability of the challenger. (Obviously, if the incumbent is popular or unpopular enough, the challenger’s standing doesn’t matter much.) The 2004 election, an election that seemed to revolve almost entirely around defining John Kerry, offers a good illustration. An incumbent hanging around the 50 percent approval mark will tend to devote his energy to disqualify the challenger, and the challenger will tend to focus on building himself up.
The problem for Romney’s campaign is that his staff is built to run a negative campaign.
Jason Zengerle’s fantastic profile of Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s all-purpose guru, underscores how and why his campaign has behaved as it has. Fehrnstrom is tabloid hit man by trade, a cynical man who is filled with resentment at the liberal swells. He excelled at crafting a series of attacks against Romney’s parade of Republican challengers, knocking each of them off one by one. But a big-picture visionary he clearly is not. The undercurrent of early criticism probably reflects the fact that Romney’s main advisers are not deeply rooted in conservative-movement ideology.
An additional problem is that Romney doesn’t have a politically attractive vision to offer. The Journal counsels him to move beyond his gauzy paeans to capitalism and American greatness and instead embrace the Paul Ryan agenda more specifically. Of course, Romney had to embrace the Ryan plan to make it through the primary, but his campaign pretty clearly grasps that this is a liability, and the more closely he’s tied to its specific policies, the worse he’ll fare. A bold and centrist agenda might work — say, an embrace of a Bowles-Simpson type of plan, perhaps coupled with some alternate proposal to ensure universal coverage. But the Ryan plan precludes that.
The Journal also argues that Romney should inoculate himself from the inevitable charge that he represents a return to the Bush era by attacking Bush’s record from the right:
Before Mr. Obama’s stimulus, Mr. Bush joined with Nancy Pelosi and Larry Summers on the blunder of “targeted, temporary” tax cuts. Mr. Bush began playing business favorites for ethanol and green energy fads. Republicans in Congress spent like Democrats and protected Fannie Mae and the housing lobby. And Mr. Bush and most Republicans embraced an easy-money Federal Reserve that favored Wall Street and asset bubbles at the expense of real middle-class incomes.
The interesting thing about this isn’t the political-advice aspect. It’s that the Journal is really giving away the game on the right-wing hysteria against Obama. After all, the point here is that many of Obama’s policies truly are a continuation of traditional bipartisan approaches. Republicans (including the Journal) have spent more than three years decrying Obama’s plans to destroy American freedom with a nefarious new agenda of profligacy and crony capitalism. Here, they’re basically admitting that Obama is just doing stuff they all considered, at worst, a minor annoyance until he proposed it. For better or worse, the party that’s departing from long-standing tradition here is the GOP. I don’t know if it matters much one way or another politically, but it’s quite an admission.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, April 26, 2012
“Worse Than Patriots In Arms”: A Patriot Or A Profiteer, But You Can’t Be Both
This week, the three military contractors that do the most business with the Pentagon announced their quarterly profits for 2012. Their profits continue to grow while they push Washington, D.C. to protect their budgets at the expense of the rest of us.
Here’s the breakdown so far for this year:
- Lockheed Martin: $668 million
- Northrop Grumman: $506 million
- Boeing: $923 million
This week’s announcement raises a fundamental question: Should people and companies be allowed to make huge profits from war? Even raising this question in today’s environment may seem trite, but we used to have different answers than those that prevail in modern-day Washington, D.C.
“I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 22, 1940.
“Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation while patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South and their countrymen mouldering the dust.” –President Abraham Lincoln.
This last quote is particularly relevant to this week’s profit announcements. Lincoln referred to war profiteers making money by cheating the Union Army. Outrage at war profiteering during this period led to the passage of “Lincoln’s Law,” officially known as the False Claims Act. The False Claims Act is the very same law that two of the companies listed above, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, violated through price-fixing and double-billing the taxpayer, leading to their having to pay roughly $20 million in the first quarter of 2012 to settle suits brought by the U.S. government.
During Roosevelt’s time, the idea of a single contractor company making almost a billion dollars worth of profit in three months would have received short shrift. As Roosevelt’s quote above shows, the idea of people profiting from war’s “disaster” disgusted him, and during his presidency the Truman Committee relentlessly investigated and exposed war profiteers. The closest analogy in our time would be the Committee on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, which found that up to $60 billion (as of September 2011) was lost to waste and fraud in military contracting in those conflicts.
And yet, despite this historical lack of patience for war profiteering, and despite the current record showing gross misconduct and waste, the U.S. government keeps shoveling taxpayer money at these huge corporations. Could it be that the $5 million in campaign donations and $32 million in lobbying dollars so far this election cycle from the military contractors keep Congress intentionally ignorant of the problem?
President George Washington knew a few things about war profiteers, and he didn’t mince words:
“There is such a thirst for gain [among military suppliers]…that it is enough to make one curse their own Species, for possessing so little virtue and patriotism.”
As long as we continue to allow the profit motive to play a role in America’s war, virtue and patriotism–to say nothing of peace–will continue to be in short supply.
By: Robert Greenwald, Co-Authored by Derrick Crowe, AlterNet, April 27, 2012
“Whiter Than George W. Bush”: Mitt Romney’s Doomed Immigration Gambit
It seems clear that the main issue Mitt Romney is going to use to try to reestablish himself as a moderate is immigration. He told a private audience on April 15 that “we have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party” and warned that current polling “spells doom for us.” Then, on Monday, he made himself available to the media for the first time in a month—while standing beside Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a leading veepstakes name. Can Romney, who staked out an immigration position during the primaries that left him sounding like Pat Buchanan, really pull this off? My bet: He’ll be smooth, he’ll do almost everything right, he’ll say all the right things—and he’ll end up with something very much like the 31 percent of the Latino vote John McCain got, maybe two or three points more, tops. The reason is simple: Romney, like his party, is just too white.
But before we get to art, let’s start with science—the polls. Obama leads Romney among Latinos by around 40 points, maybe more. A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey said 69 to 22 percent. How does Romney need to perform among Latinos? I have no idea, actually. Republicans speak wistfully of the 42 percent of that vote George W. Bush received in 2004, so they must think of it as some kind of holy grail. Bush got elected in 2004, so apparently that’s some sort of benchmark for them. Certainly, even 37 or maybe 35 percent of the Latino vote in the Mountain West for Romney would make the Obama team revert to Plan B or C as concerns Colorado and New Mexico (nationally, Latinos made up 9 percent of the overall vote in 2008; that will be up to 11 or 12 percent this year). So Romney needs to gain around 15 points—or, put another and more daunting way, he needs to improve on his present performance by 37 percent (i.e., going from 22 to 35 percent would be a 37 percent improvement).
Is that remotely possible? What would he do? Well, start with the most obvious move, picking Rubio as vice-president. Huge media buzz, of course. All manner of breathless predictions on the Sunday shows about how this changes everything—potential first Latino president, complete paradigm shift, all the rest.
One problem. There is no signal, at least yet, that Rubio would make a whit of difference. Last weekend, a poll came out in which 1,000-plus Latinos were asked about Obama-Biden matchups against Romney-Rubio, and Romney paired with various other Hispanic Republicans—including Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico (who has said she will not accept the job) and Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada. They made no difference, the poll found. In fact, in Florida, Obama did better among Latinos against Romney with Rubio on the ticket, suggesting that maybe to know him isn’t to love him.
Now we move on to substance, or at least to symbol-substance. At that same April 15 private event mentioned above, Romney said that as president he would pass a GOP version of the DREAM Act. This is exactly what Rubio has spent this week touting. Unlike the Democratic DREAM Act, it wouldn’t include a possible path to citizenship, just to green-card status. Latino groups hate it, and it does seem like an empty-calorie kind of bill, I have to say. It’s true that there are millions of permanent residents living in the United States now—about 1.1 million green cards are granted each year. But all of these people do have a future shot at citizenship, so at least they can all dream of being citizens one day, whereas under the Rubio bill, those who win such status can’t.
This is pretty small potatoes compared to what Bush supported. Remember, he was in favor of Teddy Kennedy’s immigration bill! He put a respectable amount of political capital into it, until the shitstorm hit and he backed down. Bush took what people could see was a bit of a risk. A non-citizenship DREAM Act compares to serious and comprehensive immigration reform in about the way Plessy v. Ferguson compares to Brown v. Board of Education.
And finally—art. Art is so underestimated in politics. Romney is just sooooo white. Even whiter than the Osmonds. Bush wasn’t that white. He came from a state where these days you can’t help but know some Latinos, and he spoke him a little esspanyole, even. But Romney? He fired some guys working on his lawn because he couldn’t afford the political liability of employing them, as he openly admitted at one of those GOP debates. Aside from that—well, I admit I’m no more up on the latest salsa artists than Mitt is, but do you think that guy has ever listened to one Tito Puente record in his life? Has he ever known a Latino person, outside of those who clean his houses and trim his lawns? It’s quite possible that he does. But he sure doesn’t look like he does.
Romney, therefore, will make some moves that will impress the largely white commentariat, and he’ll bump up a little among certain high-income Latino demographics. But average Latino voters, men and women who work really hard every day for white bosses, are just going to find that he reminds them too much of the guy who docks their pay when the bus comes late. And they won’t be wrong—he basically is that guy. There’s no overcoming that. He’s a 31 percenter at best.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 26, 2012
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