Ryan won’t be the first Rand fan to grace the Vice-Presidential ticket. Jack Kemp, who was Ryan’s mentor in politics, also described himself as influenced by her writing. In some ways, the Romney-Ryan ticket resembles the Dole-Kemp one, in pairing a Presidential candidate short on charisma and conservative credentials with a younger, more ideologically fiery sidekick. Kemp, however, was famously optimistic in his outlook. Ryan has a sterner countenance. Either way, though, while the G.O.P. may be behind when it comes to attracting female voters, in picking Ryan, who like Kemp was deeply influenced by Rand, it has added at least the imprint of an extra woman to the ticket. – Jane Mayer
PAUL RYAN isn’t only a policy advocate of Republican think tanks in Washington. He can also articulate a message and connect while doing it. Ryan’s got the most coveted political gifts all wrapped into one. His welcome in Wisconsin and his reaction to the people who came out to see him, as seen in the video above, illustrate his strengths, which are moored in a message that finally tells conservatives what the Republican Party stands for, not simply what the right continually rails against. There’s a lot being written about Mitt Romney’s running mate, which is worth combing through, as this is Paul Ryan week.
One thing first. On the original Paul Ryan Roadmap, the politician told Ryan Lizza that it “was just me, unplugged.” Everyone knows a politician doesn’t get everything he wants and he won’t with Romney either if he’s elected, which depends on Mitt Romney successfully rolling out his conservative darling and not turning off everyone else.
The first stop simply must be Ayn Rand. Ryan Lizza did a profile on Paul Ryan that included Ayn Randianism.
But Ryan is a devout Catholic, so he rejects Rand’s atheism, preferring Thomas Aquinas. How he squares Ms. Rand’s personal philosophy on women’s freedoms with his own is beyond me, because Rand would think Ryan a quack.
What was Ayn Rand’s view on abortion?
Excerpt from “Of Living Death” in The Objectivist, October 1968:
An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn). Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?”
If that sounds familiar, but you’re not acquainted with Ayn Rand, perhaps you read my book. It’s what an independent thinking feminist political writer would offer if she was worth her soul and I offer details of why in “Is Freedom Just For Men?,” a question that is worth asking when looking at Paul Ryan.
It’s interesting that Paul Ryan can pick and pluck from Rand’s philosophy on capitalism, but miss the very notion of a woman’s own personhood. However, that’s what religious conservatives do all the time. Relegate females to fundamentalist laws that have no business in politics. In fact, because of Ronald Reagan (there he is again), religion is embedded in our politics, including on the Democratic side, because the party considers welcoming those who don’t respect women’s autonomy as “reaching out.”
Paul Ryan’s decision to embroil Congress and the federal court system in the Terry Schiavo case explains the rest, which also includes being one of 64 co-sponsors to a fetal “personhood” bill that establishes “life” at fertilization. Needless to say, Ryan is against Obama’s no-pay contraceptive order in Obamacare. Ryan also voted to defund Planned Parenthood, with there a lot more bad news for women where that came from. He’s a forced ultrasound guy for women seeking a legal abortion, just like what got Gov. Bob McDonnell in so much trouble, but at least Ryan was in the House, so he’s the vice president and McDonnell isn’t.
He’s a religious conservative, so there’s nothing good about what he wants for women. As a fiscal guy, however, you’d think he’d get the financial side of what he’s proposing for women, whether it’s reproductive health care or Medicare and Social Security. That he doesn’t think about the poor has even gotten him in trouble with Catholics, with nuns going on a bus tour against his Roadmap, while the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops lectured lawmakers when they were voting on it [source Los Angeles Times].
Ezra Klein compiles an “all you need to know” post, some of the economic links utilized below. From Klein:
For instance: Did you know that the Ryan budget includes Obamacare’s Medicare cuts? Or that it envisions a long-term spending path for Medicare exactly identical to the path envisioned by the Obama administration? Or that it would effectively zero out Mitt Romney’s tax bill? Or that it finds its main savings not in entitlement programs, but in everything the government does that’s not an entitlement program?
From Matt Miller, who used to sub for Dylan Ratigan, a voice that’s sorely missed on cable:
But on Medicare. . . I can hear the Democratic groans coming, but Ryan deserves credit here. Ryan leaves Medicare on its current outsized trajectory for the next decade, as spending soars from $560 billion to $950 billion. Because of our uniquely inefficient health-care sector, which leaves us spending twice per capita what other wealthy nations spend, the voucher he calls for thereafter would suffice to buy seniors terrific care everywhere but here. Even if his approach is imperfect, Ryan is right to challenge our Medical Industrial Complex to change. – Understanding the Ryan plan
…Seeming genuine is something Ryan does extraordinarily well. And here is where something deeper is at play, more than Ryan’s charm and winning personality, something that gets at the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary Washington. The Ryan brand is rooted in his ostentatious wonkery. Because, unlike the Bushes and the Palins, he grounds his position in facts and figures, he seems like an encouraging candidate to strike a bargain. But the thing to keep in mind about Ryan is that he was trained in the world of Washington Republican think tanks.”
Ezra Klein: Do you worry that even if you got your spending cuts, the American economy will suffer? A report released by the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties and United States Conference of Mayors said they’ll have to lay off 500,000 people in the next few years if they don’t get some fiscal relief. That’s 500,000 people on the unemployment rolls.
Paul Ryan: I’ve always believed we need automatic stabilizers. We need a safety net. But I think it’s becoming equally important to show we’re not going to borrow endlessly. I also think it’s a bad idea to bail out states from making the necessary decisions they need to make to increase and fix their structural deficit problems. All you’re doing then is putting their liabilities on the federal books. And I assume those jobs are mostly public sector jobs. If you focus on those, that money comes from the private sector. The money isn’t free. It’s being taken out of the private economy and pumped through the private sector. The right path is to keep the money in the private sector and so they have money to invest. We should focus on growth in the private sector, not growth in the public sector.
Ryan economics, by Brad Plumer:
Ryan’s budget, recall, would raise $2 trillion less in tax revenue over the next decade than President Obama’s budget. Ryan’s plan would also spend $5.3 trillion less over that time. A big chunk of this is health care: Ryan would cut federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid for a portion of his savings. But he’d also spend $2.2 trillion less on everything else. So what, specifically, is Ryan planning to cut? (Or, alternatively, what is Obama planning to spend more on?)
[...] Over the next decade, Ryan plans to spend about 16 percent less than the White House on “income security” programs for the poor — that’s everything from food stamps to housing assistance to the earned-income tax credit. (Ryan’s budget would authorize $4.8 trillion between 2013 and 2022; the White House’s would spend $5.7 trillion.) Compared with Obama, Ryan would spend 25 percent less on transportation. He’d spend 6 percent less on “General science, space, and basic technology.” And, compared with the White House’s proposal, he’d shell out 33 percent less for “Education, training, employment, and social services.”
Paul Ryan as a strict religious conservative, via Robert Pear in the New York Times:
Though best known as an architect of conservative fiscal policy, Representative Paul D. Ryan has also been an ardent, unwavering foe of abortion rights, has tried to cut off federal money for family planning, has opposed same-sex marriage and has championed the rights of gun owners…In nearly 14 years as a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, Mr. Ryan has not only voted for legislation that would cut off federal money for Planned Parenthood and the Title X family planning program, but also backed bills to establish criminal penalties for certain doctors who perform the procedure known as partial-birth abortion. He is a co-sponsor of a bill that would define fetuses as people entitled to full legal protection, a proposal that has become the latest focus in the battles over abortion.
Paul Ryan lifts the Mitt Romneys of America, by zeroing out the taxes of the 1%, writes Alec MacGillis:
It seems hard to imagine a running mate who would jibe better with the Democrats’ Bain Capital attacks than a well-born Ayn Rand acolyte. More crucially, it is hard to imagine a running mate who will draw more attention to the matter of Romney’s taxes than Paul Ryan. Why? Because under the “Ryan plan” that made the congressman famous, Mitt Romney would pay zero taxes.
Don’t believe it? Romney himself said so, just a few months ago. The Ryan plan — formally, the “Roadmap for America’s Future” — “promotes saving by eliminating taxes on interest, capital gains, and dividends; also eliminates the death tax.” Mitt Romney’s income — more than $20 million each of the past two years — comes almost entirely from capital gains on his investments, or from “carried interest,” a cut of Bain Capital profits that are taxed as capital gains (the infamous “hedge fund loophole.”) His only major ordinary income was from the speaking fees he collected ($374,000, or “not much,” as he put it.) This explains why his tax rate was only 13.9 percent last year — because the capital gains rate is 15 percent, well below the top rate of 35 percent for ordinary income.
As for foreign policy, I’ve begun that discussion, but the election won’t be decided on national security. If anything arises that challenges Team Romney, their talking points won’t be anything voters haven’t heard from the right before. Oh, and don’t forget to double down on Iran.
The Republican Party has a direction and Paul Ryan has set it, but Mitt Romney’s the one who took it national, something that won’t be forgotten no matter the outcome this year.
There’s no one around who can confront the vision Ryan’s embedded in the political bloodstream that was approved and incubated in Republican think tanks, which means he’s got very big money behind him. That Ryan’s a disciple of supply side Reaganomics, without the tax increase angle, with money for defense and not for butter or the poor, makes November a real choice for voters.
I’m just not sure a Romney loss will stop Paul Ryan’s trajectory, which seems set. Conservatives will just blame the whole thing on Mitt Romney, then serve up Ronald Reagan’s heir in 2016, with a redrawn plan that admits overreach on entitlements, while again promising to get it done.
Ryan vs Hillary in 16? Holy cow!
AGAIN, please do not make this thread about Clinton. She’s politically irrelevant today.
The rest of your well-written piece isn’t going to matter to a sizable number of voters Taylor. Humans are attracted to charisma. Charisma can make the mundane… magnificent. The good…great! The terrible…tolerable. Paul Ryan has it. What’s funny to me is how some of the conservatives I know have fell in love with Ryan’s charisma and are talking it up while they blasted then candidate Obama’s “rock star” charisma. But we know how that is.
I’m wondering if Ryan will overshadow Romney. Even though I’m not voting for Romney-Ryan and Obama-Biden, I can still LISTEN to Ryan and how he sells “it”. Now my fringe left shields (a joke among us fringers) are still strong and his words just bounce off, but I can hear how he connects with folks. Romney just can’t do that. And what would that overshadowing do to Team Romney campaign? A positive or a negative?
You know, Ryan’s getting some really bad reviews right now.
Who knows, he might actually wake up the non-wingnuts that exist in the GOP. Somebody has to!
If they keep listening to Bill Kristol, he also picked Sarah Palin, they’ll become extinct through demographics.
Is this what you’re refering to?:
Away from the cameras, and with all the usual assurances that people aren’t being quoted by name, there is an unmistakable consensus among Republican operatives in Washington: Romney has taken a risk with Ryan that has only a modest chance of going right — and a huge chance of going horribly wrong.
Are these the same Republicans who told Harry Reid that Romney didn’t pay any taxes?
No, actually, David Stockman, a Ronald Reagan budget man.
Then there’s David Frum.
Household names, both, and RINOs to boot.
I connect with Ryan and Romney. Never thought Obama had rock star quality, don’t think Ryan does either, but, he does have a “plan” which is something and “something “needs to be done. And after checking in to the plan a bit, which I intend to do a bit closer, I notice that is doesn’t even affect people 55 or over. So far it doesn’t sound all that bad. In fact, it sounds like the government would be still subsidizing it. I intend to study it closer.
These two(Romney, Ryan) know how to handle money. It’s hard for me to vote for a man(Obama) whose administration doesn’t even make it’s Democrat majority Senate have a budget. That is so irresponsible and sneaky to me.
.
People like me who had their taxes doubled by Reagan and Greenspan when I was 23 years old are going to be massively screwed. We have been paying double all our lives and now these bozos come along and say, sorry, you should not get to collect. I’m sure there are many more people like me as those born in 1958 are subject to the Ryan plan and that was the highest birth rate the country has experienced I believe.
And Ryan’s budget seems to have plenty of money to increase military spending. I guess there’s never a budget problem when it comes to “democratzing the middle east” from a bunch of former Trotskyites. .
You are right Ga6thDem~ Your generation has been totally screwed. You should all be in the streets.
Well said, Ga6thDem.
The Medicare portion of the bill doesn’t effect people 55 and older but the Medicaid portion of it certainly does and there are millions of seniors on Medicaid.
Romney and Ryan know how to handle money when it comes to keeping it for themselves and other wealthy people whilst subsidizing their booty off the backs of the middle class, working class and poor. Well done boys!
Ryan is a contradiction in terms as far as I am concerned. You can’t channel Ayn Rand and call yourself Catholic and Christian. It doesn’t compute. So how does the right-wing so called Christians accept this guy? As to his rock star appeal, he doesn’t appeal to me in the least. I didn’t find Obama’s so-called rock star appeal any better. I look at something a little bit more substantial than rock stars.
No, you can’t. Rand thought Christianity promoted a slave mentality. The Church of Satan was based on objectivism. I guess Ryan hopes most people are stupid enough not to realize this. I’m willing to bet that for most evangelicals this will never cross their mind.
Outstanding piece again Taylor. Very well done.
You know, based on news reports, the Republicans may have done an effective job at suppressing Black and Latino votes. It is left to be seen.
However, with the Ryan pick, they may inadvertently nullify these shenanigans by scaring the daylights out of elderly voters who were safely ensconced in the Republican column and driving them back to the Democrats thus offsetting the loss of the minorities.
Ryan cannot extricate himself from Ayn Rand and her objectism philosophy anymore than Romney cannot extricate himself from Ryan and his draconian budget (which increases the deficit). They each own it now.
Let’s see how this plays outside of their base and in swing states.
As a 38-year old Gen-X’er who pretty much believes that retirement is a pastime notion for us and will be working “till death do us part”, all I can say to the Ryan Budget is:
YAWN… BLAH… HICCUP…
Now this is no disrespect to those in the 55 and up crowd who feel very threatened by the Ryan Budget, but I’ll tell you, all I see is a constant nothing regarding “The Jobs Path”. In the past 10 years, I’ve worked at four Fortune 500 companies and have been laid off all three. I call it the 2-Year Shuffle. And in that time I’ve moved from Michigan to Ohio to Georgia to South Carolina. Following the money and following the jobs. My children are “Jobs Brats” (a spin on the Army Brat). My wife has been laid off three times in that period as well.
So here we are. Election 2012 and we have an “Ayn Rand channel-er but not quite Randian but sorta kinda but loves Rand” type. Ugh… The rational self-interest-ers and laissez-faire capitalism-ers. Ya know, I’m beginning to think we are all in some not quite terrible late night sitcom that gets viewers who ultimately can’t believe they sat through the whole thing. And that is all.
Even some republicans think like you do. They have said exactly who is Romney going to convince that he’s going to bring jobs back? No one that’s already not voting for him because they want Obama out of the White House. The GOP has been selling that if we just take care of the wealthy in this country, the jobs are just going to appear. It has not worked out that way.
Sadly, I think we are living in an alternate universe. Once upon a time you stayed with the company you started out with when you were fresh out of high school/college (my dad did 42 years with Mother Bell). There was a sense of loyalty on the part of the employer and the employee. That doesn’t exist anymore. Just look at JC Penny and what Ron Johnson is doing to this business. So where are the jobs going to come from when big giants like JC Penny are laying off workers who have been with the store for years? I understand the bottom line stuff but you will never create jobs if there are no jobs to create. And as far as Team Romney is concerned – don’t believe it. They’ll never create jobs. It will never happen. He’ll protect the wealthy at all costs and the hell with the middle class and the poor. And yes, I do care about the poor. But that’s another story.
Taylor Marsh 14 August 2012 at 9:46 am #
You know, Ryan’s getting some really bad reviews right now.
I’ll see you your Republican review and raise you a Democratic review…….
“Have any of you all met Paul Ryan? We should get him to come to the university. I’m telling you this guy is amazing. … He is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did, by $4 trillion. … The president as you remember, came out with a budget and I don’t think anybody took that budget very seriously. The Senate voted against it 97 to nothing.”
You have to be kidding. This whole thing is toxic simply because he is taking money from people he doesn’t like while rewarding his campaign donors. He’ll only be serious when he offers up some cuts in military spending.