“Romney Throws A Hail Mary Pass”: Mitt’s Final Capitulation To The Right Wing
In a move somewhat reminiscent of Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, Governor Mitt Romney has put up his own Hail Mary pass in the effort to turn around a presidential campaign in decline and in need of a new storyline.
Romney has found that fresh storyline by confounding the experts and choosing Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan to be the Republican nominee for Vice President —a choice that is causing both liberal and conservative pundits, along with partisans on both sides of the political divide, to awaken to a very happy Saturday morning.
Reports had been circulating for days that conservative groups were pushing hard for the Wisconsin Congressman to be added to the ticket, despite concerns that Ryan’s views on such key issues as Medicare could cause the GOP to hemorrhage voters in some important, swing states.
Certainly, states like Florida and Pennsylvania, with their large population of senior citizens, will now become more difficult for the GOP nominees.
For committed conservatives, Ryan represents the best expression of their beliefs, values and the direction in which they would like to see the country go.
The choice also reveals Governor Romney’s final capitulation to the right-wing of his party and erases any hope that the GOP presidential candidate will attempt to move towards the center in the final days of the campaign. It’s an ‘all-in’ bet on the part of the Romney campaign—an effort to re-define their top-of-the-ticket candidate by hitching to the star of a number two with credentials far better defined than the boss.
History shows that such an approach is a risky gambit, rarely resulting in capturing the ultimate prize.
While conservatives will widely applaud the selection, Democrats have also expressed glee over the possible nomination of Paul Ryan, believing that he would put a right-wing, extremist face on the GOP ticket—thereby handing the Obama campaign an opportunity to paint the GOP as dangerous to the American middle-class and the poor.
While Ryan’s selection is reminiscent of McCain’s decision to do something dramatic as he saw his own prospects dimming, Paul Ryan is, to be sure, no Sarah Palin. There is little chance that Katie Couric is going to trip up the knowledgeable and intellectual Ryan with questions about the Congressman’s reading habits as you will likely find no better informed candidate than Mr. Ryan when it comes to matters of domestic policy.
The controversy that will likely arise from Ryan’s literary choices will come not from whether he is sufficiently well read but rather the choices he makes in reading material.
Paul Ryan is a known—and until recently—an avowed devotee of author Ayn Rand, the Russian-American moral philosopher and confirmed atheist who viewed government compassion and assistance for the poor as evil and destructive. Indeed, Ms. Rand is considered by the Cato Institute as one of the founders of American Libertarianism.
Ryan’s devotion to Rand’s perspective on government has been expressed in the Congressman’s own political philosophy—a philosophy that has made him a hero with American conservatives and libertarians. His commitment to Rand’s ‘greed is good’ outlook on life played a starring role in Ryan’s “Road Map For America”—a budget that converts Medicare into a voucher system that would result in senior citizens taking on a much larger portion of their health care costs and takes a hatchet to the social safety-net system upon which our poorest citizens rely so that taxes for the wealthy can be cut on the way to Ryan’s promise of getting our financial affairs in order in the year 2035 (a generation away).
Speaking at an event honoring the author in 2005, Ryan said, “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 would also use that occasion to call Social Security a “collectivist system” that fails to allow the laborer in America to become a capitalist.
Adding spice to what is sure to be a liberal onslaught on the issue of Ryan’s philosophical underpinnings is the fact that, earlier this year, Ryan was forced to flip-flop on his commitment to the Rand view of what America should look like when the Catholic Church took issue with the impact Ryan’s budgetary plans would have on the poor.
This past April, despite Ryan’s long held practice of giving away Ayn Rand’s books as Christmas presents and strongly suggested that incoming staffers in his employ read “Atlas Shrugged” and despite his remarks in 2005, Ryan announced:
I reject her philosophy. 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, who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.
Governor Romney’s decision to put Ryan on the ticket reveals his campaign’s deep concern that the election may be slipping away. Polls this week show Romney losing ground to President Obama, placing his campaign in a position where they had to do something and do it quickly.
Not unlike the dynamic that ensued following the choice of Sarah Palin, the anointing of Paul Ryan likely means that that Governor Romney will be forced to take a step back in prominence as Congressman Ryan—a rock star in his party—steps up to take on the substantive issues that will now become the focus of the battle.
And we all know how that worked out.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, The Policy Page, Forbes, August 11, 2012
“Let The Policy Back-Tracking Begin”: Paul Ryan Says Romneycare Is an Unsustainable “Fatal Conceit”
As I noted earlier, Mitt Romney’s new vice presidential pick is “not a fan,” to use Paul Ryan’s words, of the former Massachusetts governor’s signature legislative accomplishment.
Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski dug up last week a 2010 Ryan appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal where he blasted the Massachusetts healthcare overhaul, which Romney oversaw as governor, as “a fatal conceit.”
Asked if he thought Romneycare (upon which Obamacare was based) works, Ryan responded:
Not well, no. Actually, I’m not a fan of the system. … I’ve got some relatives up there in Massachusetts. My uncle’s a cardiologist in Boston and I’ve talked to a lot of healthcare folks up there. What’s happening now is because costs are getting out of control, premiums are increasing in Massachusetts and now you have a bureaucracy that is having to put all these cost controls and now rationing on the system. So people in Massachusetts are saying ‘yes we have virtually universal healthcare’—I think it’s 96 or 98 percent insured. But they see the system bursting by the seams. They see premium increases, rationing and benefit cuts, and so they’re frustrated with this system. … They see how this idea of having the government be the sole, you know, single regulator of health insurance, defining what kind of health insurance you can have, and then an individual mandate—it is fatal conceit. These kinds of systems, as we’re now seeing in Massachusetts are unsustainable.
Of course it’s standard operating procedure that vice presidential picks have policy differences with the top of the ticket. See George H.W. Bush and “voodoo economics,” for example. But this disagreement is more pronounced because to date Romney has run a campaign light on policy details (the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein memorably described Romney’s agenda as being less actual policy proposals and “more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. … But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.”) In a stroke Mitt Romney made Paul Ryan the functional policy director of his campaign, making sharp policy disagreements like this one more than ordinarily salient. By the same token, it will be interesting to watch the conservative reaction as Ryan is forced to correct himself on this and any other areas of disagreement with the top of the ticket. Given the extent to which his nomination is meant to pacify a querulous base a muzzled or repentant Ryan could prove problematic.
(On the other hand, Romneycare’s broad unpopularity with his party—see the uproar this week when a Romney spokeswoman spoke positively of it—has left him largely quiet on the law’s virtues so maybe “fatal conceit” will become the campaign’s official policy position on the law.)
One other point worth mentioning on Ryan and healthcare costs: It’s interesting that he criticized cost controls since they are notably absent from his Medicare overhaul scheme. While his plan would lower spending it does so not by controlling costs but by shifting the cost from the government to senior citizens. What it does do, however, is keep the Obamacare Medicare cuts … which Romney grimly denounced in introducing Ryan. I guess that’s another area where we can look forward to a little policy back-tracking.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 11, 2012
“Weakness In Romney’s Boldness”: Confident Candidates Don’t Go For Boldness, They Make A Choice For Balance
By making Rep. Paul Ryan his running mate, Mitt Romney guaranteed that this will be a big election. The Ryan budget plan will be front and center. Romney now owns its every number, policy and semicolon — unless he specifically says otherwise.
For that reason, the choice was bold. The 2012 election is now about whether the country believes that cuts in Medicare, deep reductions in programs for the poor and steep cuts in taxes for the wealthy are necessary for growth and prosperity. President Obama’s campaign is already running a sober advertisement framing the election as a referendum on this formula. For all the negative ads we will see, a great deal of substance — indeed, a fundamental choice — will underlie the rest of the campaign.
But Romney’s need to make such a bold choice is also a sign of weakness. Candidates confident in their position don’t go for boldness. They make a choice for balance, or to carry a state, or that reinforces their own persona.
Thus did Ronald Reagan pick George H.W. Bush in 1980 to appeal to GOP moderates. In 1992, Bill Clinton picked Al Gore to reinforce his own strengths: young, Southern, New Democrat.
But Romney picked Ryan because he was under intense pressure from right-wing elements of the Republican Party to prove, yet again, that he is truly a conservative. Romney has been trying to prove this ever since he announced his candidacy. Because he has been lagging in the polls, the right felt free to pressure him some more. Now, the right will back the ticket with enthusiasm. This really is the go-for-broke choice that conservatives were looking for. But the cost is that Romney will be unable to make a new appeal to the political center. And by passing on Sen. Rob Portman, Romney gives up an opportunity to strengthen himself in Ohio, a state that he absolutely needs to win and where he has been running behind.
The outcome of this election is now hugely consequential. If the Romney-Ryan ticket wins, conservatives will claim a mandate for Ryan’s radical budget ideas. But if Obama wins, conservatives will no longer be able to argue that the public was given a tepid choice by a philosophically inconstant Romney. A rejection of Romney-Ryan would be a huge blow to the conservative agenda. It will settle the argument over the role of government that we have been having since Barack Obama took the oath of office. This election really and truly matters.
UPDATE, 1:40 p.m.
The Romney campaign is clearly very sensitive about the argument that I made above — and that others, of course, are also making: that Romney now owns the Ryan budget. Here, courtesy of CNN, is a Q-and-A being distributed as part of the campaign’s talking points:
1.) Does this mean Mitt Romney is adopting the Paul Ryan plan?
Gov. Romney applauds Paul Ryan for going in the right direction with his budget, and as president he will be putting together his own plan for cutting the deficit and putting the budget on a path to balance.
Romney’s administration will go through the budget line by line and ask two questions: Can we afford it? And, if not, should we borrow money from China to pay for it?
Note that the campaign doesn’t actually give a direct answer to the question it asked itself.
And then there was this:
2) Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have different views on some policy areas — like Medicare spending, entitlement reform, labor, etc. — do you think those differences are going to hurt or help?
Of course they aren’t going to have the same view on every issue. But they both share the view that this election is a choice about two fundamentally different paths for this country. President Obama has taken America down a path of debt and decline. Romney and Ryan believe in a path for America that leads to more jobs, less debt and smaller government. So, while you might find an issue or two where they might not agree, they are in complete agreement on the direction that they want to lead America.
Again, the Romney camp does not specify in its answer exactly where Romney disagrees with Ryan. It just mentions general areas of disagreement in its question.
If Romney really wants to separate himself from Ryan’s views and his budget, he will have to get a lot more specific than this. And journalists, one would expect, will be pressing Romney hard to offer specifics on the very questions the campaign itself posed.
And thanks to my colleague Greg Sargent for pointing out the existence of these talking points in his own thoughtful take on the Ryan pick.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 11, 2012
“After The Third Time, The Rooster Crowed”: Five Times Mitt Romney Has Embraced The Ryan Budget
Just minutes after Mitt Romney announced Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his vice presidential choice, his campaign was working to distancing itself from Ryan’s signature piece of legislation — his “Path to Prosperity” budget, which would massively overhaul Medicare, Social Security, and other social programs.
In internal talking points that are sure to disappoint conservatives, Romney’s campaign weaseled around fully embracing Ryan’s plan, writing, “Gov. Romney applauds Paul Ryan for going in the right direction with his budget, and as president he will be putting together his own plan for cutting the deficit and putting the budget on a path to balance.”
But Mitt Romney has been a full-throttle endorser of the Ryan budget on several occasions since its launch. Here are five quotes from Romney himself, endorsing the Ryan plan:
1. “Very supportive.” “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan. It’s a bold and exciting effort on his part and on the part of the Republicans and it’s very much consistent with what I put out earlier. I think it’s amazing that we have a president who three and a half years in still hasn’t put a proposal out that deals with entitlements. This president’s dealing with entitlement reform — excuse me — this budget deals with entitlement reform, tax policy, which as you know is very similar to the one that I put out and efforts to reign in excessive spending. I applaud it. It’s an excellent piece of work and very much needed.”
2.”The right tone.” Romney told Talking Points Memo, “He is setting the right tone for finally getting spending and entitlements under control. …Anyone who has read my book knows that we are on the same page.’”
3. “Marvelous.” “I think it’d be marvelous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan’s budgetand to adopt it and pass it along to the president,” Romney once professed while in Wisconsin. Obama mocked him for this one: http://youtu.be/Tnp2Wa3AFRc
4. “An important step.” “I spent a good deal of time with Congressman Ryan. When his plan came out, I applauded it, as an important step. … We’re going to have to make changes like the ones Paul Ryan proposed.”
5. “The same page.” In March, on a local Wisconsin radio show called the Vicki McKenna Show, Romney told the host “Paul Ryan and I have been working together over some months to talk about our mutual plans and we’re on the same page.”
The Romney campaign’s attempt to distance itself from Ryan’s budget is particularly striking, given that one of Romney’s surrogates attacked Newt Gingrich’s campaign for doing the same thing during the GOP presidential primary. Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu said on a call with reporters, “Mitt Romney supports what Paul Ryan did. He endorsed what Paul Ryan did. Mitt Romney had his own package of entitlement reform, which Paul Ryan has praised. They both meshed together.”
Now that Romney is distancing himself from the proposal, it will be interesting to know which parts of Ryan’s budget he disagrees with.
By: Annie-Rose Strasser, Think Progress, August 11, 2012
“Lipstick On A Wonk”: Paul Ryan Is As Risky A Pick For Mitt Romney As Sarah Palin Was For John McCain
It’s official: Mitt Romney has picked Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan to join him as his running mate. I’ve already written why I think Ryan is a terrible choice. In short, his plan to cut taxes on the rich and gut the welfare state is one of the most unpopular proposals in American politics. Conservatives love Ryan, but seniors, young people, women, nonwhites, veterans, the disabled, and the poor might feel differently about a man who wants to make the federal government an ATM for the wealthy.
In terms of the election, it’s hard to see how Romney gains from this choice. Because of its large population of working-class whites, Wisconsin has the potential to become a swing state, but for now, Obama has a solid lead. Yes, vice presidential nominees provide a home-state boost, but it’s small—on average, two points. Barring a major change in the race, the most Ryan will do is help Romney lose Wisconsin by a somewhat smaller margin than he would have otherwise.
With that said, a vice presidential choice is most important for what it says about the nominee, and Ryan reflects poorly on Mitt Romney. On the first and most crucial qualification—“Can this person govern the country if the president dies or leaves office”—the answer is “no one knows.” Ryan has no executive experience of any kind: no experience leading a large organization, or something just as complex like a presidential campaign. Executive experience isn’t everything, but it does stick out, especially given Romney’s short tenure in public office.
Ryan has little experience with foreign policy—even less than Romney, in fact—and has spent the majority of his adult life in the House of Representatives. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but by the standards of the Republican Party, which routinely knocks Obama for his lack of private-sector experience, it’s a major failing. Conservative Ryanmania (like Beatlemania, except with white, aging billionaires) notwithstanding, there’s no evidence that Ryan could step in and govern if President Romney were incapacitated.
Paul Ryan exudes confidence, has a tremendous amount of political skill—as Dave Weigel said on Twitter, it’s no small feat to convince Washington journalists that you are a serious budget wonk, despite the complete lack of evidence—and Ryan benefits from the presumption that powerful white men know what they’re doing. But in terms of his ability to lead, he’s no less risky than Sarah Palin. In evaluating Romney’s readiness, we should keep this choice in mind.
The Ryan choice also says a lot about Romney’s standing with conservatives. If he had their full support, he would be free to choose a more moderate running mate, like New Jersey’s Chris Christie. Hell, if he had their partial support, he could choose another conservative in sheep’s clothing, like Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. But he lacks the trust and good will of the conservative establishment. For a presidential challenger, this is dangerous: Romney can’t win the White House if he doesn’t have a unified base.
If there’s anything that would earn him the unconditional support of conservatives, it’s choosing their prophet as his running mate. It satisfies their calls to make this election about “big ideas,” and not just a referendum on President Obama. If you believe that Americans are clamoring for Medicare cuts, this is a swell plan. But since they aren’t, it’s hard to say that this is a good political choice for Romney. Indeed, there’s an even greater downside for his career—if he loses, conservatives will blame him for weighing down Ryan. He will become a pariah, banished from the halls of Republican power.
One last thing. Many people, liberals included, are convinced that Romney is playing a part. “He’s not really a conservative,” they say, “In office, he’ll move to the center.” The Ryan pick should disabuse everyone of that idea. The Right has a firm grip on the Romney campaign, which will grow tighter if he’s elected president. To borrow from David Frum, this is “about forcing a platform on Romney, and then dictating the agenda for that presidency’s first year.”
The stakes have just been raised. If Obama loses, we can look forward to President Mitt Romney, Vice President Paul Ryan, and the most right-wing presidential administration in modern American history.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, August 11, 2012
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