“Reverse Bain Pain For Mitt”: The Right Completes Its Hostile Takeover Of Romney
Romney-Ryan constitutes, very possibly, the best-looking ticket in American political history. Mitt Romney is so textbook handsome that he resembles a toy action-figure president. Paul Ryan’s youthful, chiseled face and piercing blue eyes are already making hearts flutter around the political world. And no doubt Romney’s bold choice for veep – which has made most people forget, for the moment, Bain Capital and his undisclosed tax returns– will give the Republican presumptive nominee some pop in the polls. For the moment.
But once the excitement surrounding Ryan subsides, the long, ideological slog of this presidential race will resume, and with greater force than before. The stakes will be, once again, about the stark conceptual choice that American voters now face. Romney’s selection of Ryan must be seen as part of a continuum of hard-line positions that the GOP candidate, under constant pressure from an often hostile right, has laid out on everything from immigration to health care to foreign policy.
And with his veep choice Romney is sending a message to the American electorate, more forthrightly than ever, that he won’t be moving to the middle after all. He seems to be affirming that he is just about as ideologically conservative and as captured by the GOP base as Obama has been painting him.
Judging from the Obama campaign’s line of attack since his speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors last April, this is just what the president wanted: an election that turns, to a very great extent, on the radical nature of Ryan’s budget–not so much on the numbers it lays out but on the vision it represents. The plan embodies a fiercely pared-down, pre-New Deal (or at least pre-Eisenhower) concept of government that the Congressional Budget Office (which analyzed the plan at Ryan’s request) concluded would effectively eliminate, by 2050, funding for education, highways, veterans’ programs, foreign aid, medical and scientific research, national parks, food and water safety, and most programs for low-income families and individuals other than Medicaid, as well as partially privatize Medicare. Ryan’s tax proposal would also clearly deepen the already wide gulf in income.
Thus, this is an election that also turns on the still-lingering question: Who’s really in charge in the GOP? Is it Romney or the Orthodoxicrats of the tea party/Grover Norquist crowd? Bob Schieffer sought to tackle this question on Sunday in his 60 Minutes interview of the dynamic duo. “Some people are saying you are making it [the election] a referendum on Paul Ryan’s budget plan,” Schieffer asked Romney. Romney responded that “I have my budget plan, as you know, that I’ve put out. And that’s the budget plan that we’re going to run on.”
But in fact, there is no full-blown Romney budget plan, not anything that has the operational detail of the Ryan plan. And until there is, voters will no doubt be justified in assuming that Romney still endorses Ryan’s plan as he did last spring, when he called it “marvelous” — which, as Obama himself sardonically noted in his April speech, “is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget.”
Well before the veep choice was announced, Obama had been linking Romney directly to Ryan in a strategy that appeared to emulate Bill Clinton’s successful 1996 takedown of Bob Dole, as I wrote in April. Just as Clinton successfully tied the center-right Kansas senator to the then-far-right Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House, and warned voters that “Dole-Gingrich” would cost them “large parts of their Social Security and Medicare,” Obama jumped on Romney’s seeming endorsement of Ryan’s budget last spring.
Recall the president’s April speech: “Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract With America look like the New Deal,” Obama said to laughter. “In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget ‘radical’ and said it would contribute to ‘right-wing social engineering.’ ”
For Clinton, the charges in ’96 stuck not least because Dole decided to run with a zealous supply-sider, former Rep. Jack Kemp.
Romney is as welded now to Ryan as Dole was to Kemp. Still, he does have one big factor in his favor that Dole didn’t: an economic crisis and record-high unemployment, all of which may give him and his vision of government the sort of validation that Dole lacked in a generally healthy economy.
Romney’s problem is that he has persistently failed to get himself over the 50 percent mark in national polls that he needs to win. He’ll have to capture at least some of the middle to do that, including the broad mass of white, middle-class voters who depend on Medicare and other government programs. It’s not clear that Paul Ryan, no matter how handsome and winning he may be as a personality, is the pick who’s going to do that for him.
By: Michael Hirsh, National Journal, August 13, 2012
“Phony Hawkery”: Paul Ryan Is A Conservative Ideologue Who Couches “Right Wing Social Engineering”
This is something that other people have mentioned, and Jamelle brings up in his extremely helpful post about Paul Ryan, but it really needs to be emphasized: Paul Ryan is not a “deficit hawk.” No matter how many times the news media tell us, it doesn’t make it true. As I’ve said before, you can’t call yourself a deficit hawk if the only programs you want to cut are the ones you don’t like anyway. Show me someone who’s willing to cut programs he favors (Ryan isn’t), and would actually take potentially painful measures to balance the budget (Ryan wouldn’t), and that’s a deficit hawk. Ryan, on the other hand, is a conservative ideologue who couches what Newt Gingrich appropriately called “right-wing social engineering” in a lot of talk about making tough choices. But I’ve never actually seen Paul Ryan make a “tough” choice, at least one that was tough for him. There’s nothing “tough” about a conservative Republican who tells you he wants to slash Medicare and Medicaid, increase defense spending, and cut taxes for the wealthy. That’s like Homer Simpson telling you he’s making the tough choice to skip the salad and eat three dozen donuts instead.
But oh boy, have the media ever bought into the idea of Ryan as the courageous budget-cutter. “A Beltway Budget Hawk Gets a Chance to Sell Vision” says The Wall Street Journal. “Paul Ryan: Hawk on Budget and Tea Party Darling” says the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We know Paul Ryan is a budget hawk. But what about other issues?” says the Christian Science Monitor. And that’s just a few headlines; there are hundreds of stories referring to Ryan as a “fiscal hawk,” a “budget hawk,” and a “deficit hawk.”
So why does he get described this way so often? I think it’s because the establishment media have become devoted to a particular narrative, which says that the country is deeply threatened by the future growth of Social Security and Medicare, and anyone who has the “courage” to propose cuts to those programs is a hero (Time‘s Michael Grunwald did an excellent examination last year of all kinds of people weirdly praising Ryan’s courage). And even if, like Ryan, you also want to slash taxes and increase the deficit, you’re still a hero.
It’s strange how you never see the members of the congressional Progressive Caucus, who want to cut defense spending and bring in more tax revenues than Ryan does, described as “deficit hawks,” or, heaven forbid, “courageous.” Representative Jan Schakowsky, for instance, put out a plan that balances the budget in a much shorter amount of time than Paul Ryan’s plan, but does so primarily through a combination of tax increases and defense cuts. Nobody calls Schakowsky a “deficit hawk” or praises her “courage” on fiscal issues, even though her proposal is far more realistic and less cruel than Ryan’s. Could it have something to do with the fact that your average Washington 1 percenter actually thinks slashing programs for the poor and cutting taxes for the wealthy is a smashing idea?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 13, 2012
“Simply A Number Decreed As Necessary”: Romney’s Budget Plan Requires Even Deeper Cuts Than Ryan’s
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will hit the campaign trail today in his first week as Mitt Romney’s running mate. Deservedly, much of the attention on Ryan so far has been regarding his radical budget, which hugely shifts taxation down the income scale and guts important government investments.
But Romney’s budget also includes substantial reductions to key federal investments and the social safety net, in order to cut taxes for the wealthy and maintain sky-high defense spending. In fact, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, Romney’s budget would require even deeper cuts to spending that Ryan’s, in order to keep defense spending at an arbitrarily set percentage of the economy:
– Under the Ryan plan, core defense spending (the defense budget other than war costs and some relatively small items such as military family housing),[11] would total about $5.7 trillion over the ten-year period 2013-2022. The Romney plan would increase core defense spending to $7.9 trillion. The Ryan plan increases core defense funding modestly relative to the existing BCA caps, but core defense would nevertheless decline to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2022. In contrast, Governor Romney would increase core defense to 4 percent of GDP.
– The Ryan plan would cut entitlement and discretionary programs (outside of core defense and net interest) by $5.2 trillion over ten years.[12] The Romney proposal would cut this spending by between $7.0 trillion and $9.6 trillion, depending upon whether the budget is balanced. Thus, Governor Romney’s ten-year cuts would range from one-third deeper than those in the Ryan budget to almost twice as deep as the Ryan cuts.
These cuts would have severe consequences for individual programs, including potentially throwing 13 million people off of the food stamp program.
As Bloomberg News noted, Ryan’s tax plan involves giving slightly more away to the wealthy than does Romney’s, but Romney more than makes up for it with his budget’s gutting of programs that aid the middle-class and low-income Americans. And he does it in order to preserve a level of defense spending that has nothing to do with defense priorities, but is simply a number that Romney decreed is necessary.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, August 13, 2012
“A Suspension Of Intellectual Honesty”: Mitt Romney And Paul Ryan’s Medicare Hypocrisy
On the matter of Medicare, Mitt Romney’s campaign seems to have adopted the approach that the best defense is a good offense. And while it should come as no surprise that their attacks require a degree of shamelessness and a suspension of intellectual honesty, the scope of it is breathtaking.
When the former Massachusetts governor tapped House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan as his running mate, he immediately took ownership of Ryan’s biggest liability, that he proposed to replace Medicare, the Great Society-era program which guaranteed health coverage for senior citizens, with a voucher-based program of the same name. The vouchers would cover a diminishing portion of seniors’ healthcare costs and they’d be on the hook for the balance. The fundamental promise of Medicare would be gone.
Understandably, this proposal is unpopular, especially among senior citizens (though he exempts current Medicare beneficiaries from his proposal). So how has the Romney campaign elected to deal with this political problem? Going on offense, of course.
Obama, Romney and the GOP has started charging, “robbed” Medicare to pay for his health reform program. It’s true that Obamacare cut Medicare reimbursements (not benefits). That would be a clean political hit attack but for one small problem the Romney-Ryan team has: Ryan’s budget keeps those $700 billion in cuts. Oh, and Romney has endorsed Ryan’s budget.
If that sounds confusing, here it is more simply: Romney and Ryan are condemning Obama for Medicare cuts that they both endorse. Like I said, it’s pretty breathtaking.
But wait, there’s more.
As The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn writes:
The most significant difference between the two sides, at least for the short- to medium-term, is how they handle the savings these cuts generate. Obamacare puts the money back into the pockets of people who need help with their medical bills. A portion of the money is earmarked for children and non-elderly Americans, who, starting in 2014, will become eligible for Medicaid or receive tax credits to offset the cost of private insurance. A smaller, but still significant, portion of the money is for seniors. It helps them pay for prescription drugs, by filling the “donut hole” in Medicare Part D coverage. It also eliminates out-of-pocket costs for annual wellness visits, some cancer screenings, and other preventative services.
Ryan’s budget—which, again, Romney has repeatedly embraced and said he would sign—actually takes those new benefits away. The Part D donut hole would open back up. Access to free preventative care would vanish. And where would Ryan and Romney put the money instead? They say it’s for deficit reduction. I’d say it’s really for their big new tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy.
If nothing else, the Romney-Ryan campaign has an impressive level of chutzpah.
BY” Robert Schlesinger, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, August 13, 2012
“Paul Ryan And The Triumph Of Theory”: A View Of The World Defined By Big Ideas That Never Touch The Ground
If Paul Ryan were a liberal, conservatives would describe him as a creature of Washington who has spent virtually all of his professional life as a congressional aide, a staffer at an ideological think tank and, finally, as a member of Congress. In the right’s shorthand: He never met a payroll.
If they were in a sunny mood, these conservatives would readily concede that Ryan is a nice guy who’s fun to talk to. But they’d also insist that he is an impractical ideologue. He holds an almost entirely theoretical view of the world defined by big ideas that never touch the ground and devotes little energy to considering how his proposed budgets might affect the lives of people he’s never met.
In making Ryan his running mate, Mitt Romney guaranteed that this election will be about big principles, but he also underscored a little-noted transformation in American politics: Liberals and conservatives have switched sides on the matter of which camp constitutes the party of theory and which is the party of practice. Americans usually reject the party of theory, which is what conservatism has now become.
In the late 1960s and ’70s, liberals ran into trouble because they were easily mocked as impractical ideologues with excessive confidence in their own moral righteousness. They were accused of ignoring the law of unintended consequences and of failing to look carefully at who would be helped and who’d be hurt by their grand schemes.
Since I’m a liberal, I’d note that these criticisms were not always fair. Many of the liberals’ enduring achievements — from civil rights to environmental laws to Medicare — grew from the boldness their confidence inspired. But, yes, there was arrogance in liberalism’s refusal to take conservatism seriously.
Conservatives, in the meantime, gained ground by asking tough and practical questions: Will this program work as promised? Does it bear any connection to how the world really works? And, by the way, who benefits?
Now, it is liberals who question conservative master plans and point to the costs of conservative dreams. And in Ryan and his budget proposals, they have been gifted with the perfect foil.
How can Ryan justify his Medicaid cuts when, as the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found, they would likely leave 14 million to 19 million poor people without health coverage? How can he justify tax proposals that, as The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis pointed out, would reduce the rate on Mitt Romney’s rather substantial income to less than 1 percent? How can he claim his budgets are anti-deficit measures when, as The Post’s Matt Miller has noted, his tax cuts would add trillions to the debt and we wouldn’t be in balance until somewhere around 2030?
For Ryan, such questions (and many others arise) are beside the point because his purposes are so much grander. “Only by taking responsibility for oneself, to the greatest extent possible, can one ever be free,” he wrote in the introduction to his “A Roadmap for America’s Future” in 2010, “and only a free person can make responsible choices — between right and wrong, saving and spending, giving or taking.”
This is close to the definition of freedom offered by Ayn Rand, Ryan’s one-time philosophical hero, in her book, “The Virtue of Selfishness.” Ryan didn’t quote Rand, but as the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza observed, he did cite a lot of intellectuals, including Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and Georges-Eugène Sorel. Didn’t conservatives once dismiss this sort of thing as “a term paper”?
None of this takes away from Ryan’s charm or seriousness. My one extended experience with him came seven years ago, when I moderated a thoughtful and exceptionally civil discussion about politics between Ryan and his liberal Wisconsin colleague Tammy Baldwin. Both were impressive, and the encounter brought home to me why Ryan is personally popular. He is great to engage with and really believes what he says.
But the issue in this election will be how Americans want to be governed. Republicans mock President Obama for still thinking like the professor he once was, yet in this race, Obama — far more than today’s conservative theorists and to the occasional consternation of his more liberal supporters — is the pragmatist. He’s talking about messy trade-offs: between taxes and spending, government and the private sector, dreams and the facts on the ground. In embracing Ryan, Romney has tied himself to the world of high conservative ideology. As liberals learned long ago, ideology usually loses.
By: E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 12, 2012
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