mykeystrokes.com

"Do or Do not. There is no try."

“Is Paul Ryan Racist?”: The Continuation Of A History That The Republican Party Just Can’t Ignore

Paul Ryan triggered a firestorm of recrimination this week. Speaking recently on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio program, the Wisconsin Republican and self-styled budget wonk linked poverty to “this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”

Setting aside the factual claim — the notion that poverty is especially concentrated in America’s inner cities is an increasingly antiquated one — these comments elicited a quick and forceful rebuke from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), who decried them as “a thinly veiled racial attack.” She explained: “[W]hen Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says, ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black.’”

Ryan has since backpedaled, protesting that race was nowhere in his thoughts: “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.”

Maybe so, but there’s a history here that the Republican Party can’t ignore — one that explains why Lee was so quick to jump on his comments, why the Congressional Black Caucus announced themselves “deeply troubled” by remarks they described as “highly offensive” and why so many others have sharply criticized Ryan.

By calling out his use of “code words,” Lee put Ryan in the company of past politicians who have blown the proverbial dog whistle — using surreptitious references to race to garner support from anxious voters. Examples of dog whistling include Barry Goldwater’s endorsement of “states’ rights”; Richard Nixon’s opposition to “forced busing”; Ronald Reagan’s blasts against “welfare queens”; and George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ad.

These instances of racial pandering typically have been treated as disconnected eruptions, when in fact the GOP has made a concerted effort to win support through racial appeals. This pattern is so entrenched — and so well known — that two different chairs of the Republican National Committee have acknowledged and apologized for this strategy.

“By the seventies and into the eighties and nineties,” RNC chair Ken Mehlman said in a 2005 speech before the NAACP, “Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” Five years later, his successor Michael Steele similarly acknowledged that “for the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”

Despite the mea culpas, race baiting has continued: recall New Gingrich’s 2012 tarring of Barack Obama as “the best food-stamp president in American history.” Or consider another Gingrich jibe from the last election: “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” he claimed. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”

What, then, of Paul Ryan? Was he dog whistling? To many, his strong echoing of Gingrich, coupled with the larger GOP history of racial pandering, suggested so. Nor did Ryan help himself by invoking the conservative scholar Charles Murray — a man who co-wrote a controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve, tying intelligence to race, and who in 2000 explained that genetics will likely show, “One reason that we still have poverty in the United States is that a lot of poor people are born lazy.”

But what of Ryan’s insistence he did not consider race whatsoever, or his later explanation that he had been “inarticulate” in his comments? Perhaps Ryan genuinely did not recognize the racial narrative embedded in his remarks about an inner city culture that devalues work. But at best, this suggests that Ryan has uncritically adopted the charged rhetoric of his party without understanding its racial undertones.

Less charitably, in weighing Ryan’s protestations of innocence, we should be clear that denying racial intent is par for the course in dog whistling. The whole point of speaking in coded terms is to transmit racial messages that can be defended as not about race at all. Today’s broadly shared anti-racist ethos condemns naked appeals to racial solidarity; those politicians who nevertheless seek to trade on racial provocations must do so in ways that maintain plausible deniability.

Another defense is to insist that Ryan is no bigot. Here’s one version, from Republican political strategist Ron Christie: “Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is not racist nor did he blow a ‘dog whistle’ to launch a thinly veiled racist attack against black people. I offer this from the perspective of someone who has known Paul for more than 20 years: there is not a racist bone in his body.” The fact that Christie is black no doubt lends credibility to his testimony.

But this retort misses the point. Dog whistling is not rooted in fiery hatred but rather in cool calculation — it’s the strategic, carefully considered decision to win votes by stirring racial fears in society. Suppose we stipulate that Ryan is no bigot. So what? The question is not one of animus on Ryan’s part, but of whether — as a tactical matter — he sought to garner support by indirectly stimulating racial passions.

Of course, an individual’s mindset in any particular instance is almost impossible to know. We cannot be certain what Ryan intended. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that Ryan employed rhetoric closely connected to a dismal history of Republican racial demagoguery.

Barbara Lee was correct to respond forcefully. In our political culture, dog whistling all too often takes the form of warnings about a “tailspin of culture” in the “inner cities” and “generations of men not even thinking about working.” Sharply rebuked, hopefully Ryan and others will think twice — or, if Ryan is to be believed, then think for the first time — about using political rhetoric imbued with ugly racial stereotypes.

 

By: Ian Haney Lopez, Law Professor at UC Berkeley and Senior Fellow at Demos; Moyers and Company, Bill Moyers Blog, March 16, 2014

March 17, 2014 Posted by | Paul Ryan, Poverty, Racism | , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Those Lazy Inner-City White Folks”: The Terrible Tyranny Of Federal Assistance

Unlike Rick Perry, Paul Ryan is a master of subtlety in his double-talk on the future of the New Deal/Great Society legacy under Republican governance. Conservative activists may understand that his budget proposals for turning Medicare into a defined-contribution premium support program, or for block-granting Medicaid, represent way stations to a return to the glorious days before 1933. But the out-front rhetoric is always about “saving” Medicare and “reforming” Medicaid. Similarly, Ryan has invested heavily in concern-trolling poor people by suggesting that their “moral fiber” and prospects for upward mobility are being threatened by the tyranny of federally subsidized food, health care, and income support. That all these crocodile tears happen to coincide with the policy predilections of conservatives who view poor people as looters and constitution-destroyers (following the explicit views of Ryan’s muse Ayn Rand) is just a coincidence, it seems.

But even Ryan screws up now and then, and he’s furiously back-peddling from comments made in the friendly confines of Bill Bennett’s radio show about the non-existent work ethic of “inner-city” men. Gee, wonder who he could be talking about? Lauren Victoria Burke asked him about that, and he was just stunned anyone could think it was a racial dog-whistle:

When I asked Ryan if he’d like to “revise and extend his remarks on black men” as he left he House floor after last votes on Wednesday he said, “it was taken out of context — it was, that was — out of left field — out of context.”

“This has nothing to do whatsoever with race,” Ryan added as we spoke in an elevator. He also indicated that it was Bennett that raised the initial issue over the course of a lengthy discussion.

“It was a long talk and he asked about the culture and I just went off of that,” Ryan said. “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever,” he repeated.

This sort of assertion, backed up when necessary by the claim that the questioner is “playing the race card,” is common enough on the Right that Ryan will probably get away with it unscathed. And that’s a shame: it would be instructive and entertaining to force him to produce some examples of inner-city white folks suffering from the terrible tyranny of federal assistance.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 13, 2014

March 15, 2014 Posted by | Paul Ryan, Poverty | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Let Them Eat Dignity”: Conservatives Assure The Poor That The Health Of Their Souls Demands They Go Hungry

A few days ago, Paul Ryan got caught repeating a little fib in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It was of a not-uncommon type, in which a vivid anecdote somebody hears from somewhere gets told and retold in a game of political telephone in which the facts get mangled and the story from elsewhere becomes something the speaker claims happened to her. We can forgive Ryan for repeating it, since the falsehood didn’t originate with him. But the real power of the story lies in its revelation of the cruelty that underlies the way contemporary American conservatives look at the poor, and the wispy veil they try to pull over that cruelty in the hopes we won’t see it for what it is.

To start, here’s the story Ryan told, about Eloise Anderson, who directs the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families:

She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.

As the Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler explained, though Anderson indeed told this story at a congressional hearing, it actually didn’t happen to her, but came from a book (which she later admitted). More important, she changed the story to make it more closely fit conservative ideology; in real life, the child in question wasn’t getting a lunch from the government, but from a rich lady he met; and more important, it wasn’t that he didn’t want a free lunch, he just wanted his free lunch in a paper bag so the other kids wouldn’t know he was getting help. That’s an old story about poverty and shame—a relationship, by the way, that conservatives work hard to maintain.

But here’s the part of Ryan’s speech that really matters: “The left is making a mistake here,” he said. “What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.” And later: “People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity.” Ah yes, the “life of comfort” you get when you are able to eat not one, not two, but as many as three meals a day! Talk about easy street.

Whenever conservatives start throwing around ideas like “dignity” and talking about the contents of people’s souls, watch out. Because it almost always means that what they’re proposing is to make the lives of the vulnerable a little tougher and a little more deprived. This’ll hurt you more than it hurts them.

And that is indeed what Ryan proposes. The last budget plan he released, like those before it, sought to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs that provide assistance to the poor—because as Ryan once said, “we don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”

I suspect conservatives talk this way as much for their own benefit—for the maintenance of their souls, if you will—as for the poor people they’re ostensibly addressing. Almost all of us, with the exception of a few true-believing Ayn Rand cultists, believe that we have obligations to one another, no matter how selfish we might be on most days. If you’re literally taking food from the mouths of hungry children, you have to justify it somehow, to assure yourself that you’re still a moral person. So you tell yourself that you’re doing it to help them. You’re giving them something more valuable than food, because you care so deeply about them. When that six-year-old gets that grumble in her stomach, you can tell her what she’s feeling is the growing pains of her soul, as it swells with its newfound dignity.

The souls of the wealthy, on the other hand, are apparently so healthy and strong they can withstand the indignity of government help. Special tax treatment for investment income? The mortgage interest deduction? Cuts to upper-income tax rates? The rich are truly blessed with souls so resilient that they remain intact even in the face of such injuries of government largesse.

But that’s the way it is with everything. Conservatives are not worried that hedge-fund managers will be slowly sapped of their will to work when their income is taxed at an absurd 15 percent rate because of the carried interest loophole, leaving the rest of us to pick up their slack. When they address that question, there is no talk of dignity. Only when it comes time to cut food stamps or kick people off of the first health insurance they’ve ever had (as Ryan also wants to do, by eliminating the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid) do conservatives turn so philosophical, casting their gaze beyond the trivialities of daily existence, like food, and toward such higher considerations.

If you were being unkind, you might say that when it comes to poor people’s dignity, the right has mostly been concerned of late in seeing that they have as little as possible, by advocating things like forcing people to take drug tests before getting welfare benefits. Perhaps they believe that a combination of hunger and humiliation will be just the encouragement those lazy poor need to take a firm hold of their bootstraps and pull. True, that expression originally meant doing something that is physically impossible—you can tug on your bootstraps all you like, but it won’t pull you out of a hole. You will be carried aloft by your soul, though, so long as it isn’t sullied by safety net programs.

This, in the end, is the essence of conservative thought on these issues. Better a child should go hungry than get a free lunch. Better a poor person should have no health insurance at all than get insurance from the government. Their suffering may multiply, but they’ll still have their dignity. If only you could eat it.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 10, 2014

March 11, 2014 Posted by | Conservatives, Paul Ryan, Poverty | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Hammock Fallacy”: Paul Ryan’s Poverty Report, Like His Famous Budget Plan, Is A Con Job

Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. So when you see something like the current scramble by Republicans to declare their deep concern for America’s poor, it’s a good sign, indicating a positive change in social norms. Goodbye, sneering at the 47 percent; hello, fake compassion.

And the big new poverty report from the House Budget Committee, led by Representative Paul Ryan, offers additional reasons for optimism. Mr. Ryan used to rely on “scholarship” from places like the Heritage Foundation. Remember when Heritage declared that the Ryan budget would reduce unemployment to a ludicrous 2.8 percent, then tried to cover its tracks? This time, however, Mr. Ryan is citing a lot of actual social science research.

Unfortunately, the research he cites doesn’t actually support his assertions. Even more important, his whole premise about why poverty persists is demonstrably wrong.

To understand where the new report is coming from, it helps to recall something Mr. Ryan said two years ago: “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” There are actually two assertions here. First, antipoverty programs breed complacency; that is, they discourage work. Second, complacency — the failure of the poor to work as much as they should — is what perpetuates poverty.

The budget committee report is almost entirely concerned with the first assertion. It notes that there has been a large decline in labor force participation, and it claims that antipoverty programs, which reduce the incentive to work, are a major reason for this decline. Then come 200 pages of text and 683 footnotes, designed to create the impression that the scholarly research literature supports the report’s claims.

But it doesn’t. In some cases, Mr. Ryan and colleagues outright misstate what the research says, drawing outraged protests from a number of prominent scholars about the misrepresentation of their work. More often, however, the report engages in argument by innuendo. It makes an assertion about the bad effects of a program, then mentions a number of studies of that program, and thereby leaves the impression that those studies support its assertion, even though they don’t.

What does scholarly research on antipoverty programs actually say? We have quite good evidence on the effects of food stamps and Medicaid, which draw most of Mr. Ryan’s ire — and which his budgets propose slashing drastically. Food stamps, it seems, do lead to a reduction in work and working hours, but the effect is modest. Medicaid has little, if any, effect on work effort.

Over all, here’s the verdict of one comprehensive survey: “While there are significant behavioral side effects of many programs, their aggregate impact is very small.” In short, Mr. Ryan’s poverty report, like his famous budget plan, is a con job.

Now, you can still argue that making antipoverty programs much more generous would indeed reduce the incentive to work. If you look at cross-county comparisons, you find that low-income households in the United States, which does less to help the poor than any other major advanced nation, work much more than their counterparts abroad. So, yes, incentives do have some effect on work effort.

But why, exactly, should that be such a concern? Mr. Ryan would have us believe that the “hammock” created by the social safety net is the reason so many Americans remain trapped in poverty. But the evidence says nothing of the kind.

After all, if generous aid to the poor perpetuates poverty, the United States — which treats its poor far more harshly than other rich countries, and induces them to work much longer hours — should lead the West in social mobility, in the fraction of those born poor who work their way up the scale. In fact, it’s just the opposite: America has less social mobility than most other advanced countries.

And there’s no puzzle why: it’s hard for young people to get ahead when they suffer from poor nutrition, inadequate medical care, and lack of access to good education. The antipoverty programs that we have actually do a lot to help people rise. For example, Americans who received early access to food stamps were healthier and more productive in later life than those who didn’t. But we don’t do enough along these lines. The reason so many Americans remain trapped in poverty isn’t that the government helps them too much; it’s that it helps them too little.

Which brings us back to the hypocrisy issue. It is, in a way, nice to see the likes of Mr. Ryan at least talking about the need to help the poor. But somehow their notion of aiding the poor involves slashing benefits while cutting taxes on the rich. Funny how that works.

 

By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 6, 2014

March 8, 2014 Posted by | Paul Ryan, Poverty | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Paul Ryan And The Brown Bag”: Once Again, The Congressman Just Doesn’t Get It

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) covered a fair amount of ground in his speech this morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but there was one story in particular that stood out.

“This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my friend Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. But he told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch – one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids’. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.

“That’s what the Left just doesn’t understand.”

I’ve read this a few times, hoping Ryan had some other subtle subtext, but I’m afraid the congressman really is as confused as his anecdote suggests.

The child may have wanted a lunch in a brown-paper bag, but – and I hope Ryan pauses to really think about this – his family is poor. The boy “didn’t want a free lunch,” but – and this is key – he didn’t want to be hungry, either.

It’s true that Republican policymakers could take away that free lunch the child received at the school, but that doesn’t mean the boy’s family will suddenly have more money to pack a healthy lunch in a brown-paper bag.

What’s more, it’s also true this kid may come from a struggling family, but it doesn’t mean he lacks “someone who cares for him”; it means he and his family lack the resources needed to send him to school with a good meal. Robert Schlesinger added, “A kid with a brown paper bag does have someone who loves them; but the kid without the brown paper bag, the one whose parent either won’t or can’t – because they’re working hard to get ahead and give themselves and their families better lives – deserves a society that loves and cares for them too.”

That’s what Paul Ryan just doesn’t understand.

In the same speech, the Wisconsin Republican added:

“The reason [Democrats[ keep talking about income inequality is because they can’t talk about economic growth. They have spent five, long years in power, and all they have to show for it is this lousy website.”

That’d be a good point, just so long as one overlooks the Recovery Act that ended the Great Recession, the millions of new jobs, health care reform that brought coverage to millions, the rescue of the auto industry, Wall Street reform, the end of the war in Iraq, counter-terrorism successes, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and student-loan reform, among other things.

Oh, and the health care website was fixed a few months ago.

Other that, though, Ryan’s on strong ground.

Update: In the school-lunch anecdote, I falsely assumed Ryan had the basic details of the story right. He didn’t: “Via Wonkette, the school lunch story appears to have been recycled from a story and altered beyond recognition in the process. The original story had nothing to do with a child turning down a free lunch. It’s about a kid, Maurice, who met a private benefactor, Laura, asking to literally have his lunch placed in a brown paper bag.”

 

By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 6, 2014

March 7, 2014 Posted by | Paul Ryan, Poverty | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »