VOTERS DON’T VOTE on the vice presidential pick, even if conservatives are slathering their primary wounds over his choice, which Mitt Romney knows. The choice of Paul Ryan isn’t simply about the base either, because Mitt Romney is betting they’ll do just about anything to keep Pres. Obama from winning in November. It’s also not a gift to Democrats, who are convinced Ryan augments Romney’s rich man, kill entitlements as we know them, it will be a high time for the wealthy platform. And Paul Ryan will not cost Mitt Romney the election in November, which he is very capable of losing on his own, as he’s proven so far this year.
“When you put the two men side by side, the fact that they are white, Catholic, working-class guys just jumps off the page immediately,” said Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine who has written extensively about class and cultural divisions in U.S. politics. Both Biden and Ryan exhibit an ease in personal encounters with voters that is lacking in Obama and Romney, neither of whom is likely to be mistaken for a natural backslapper and flesh-presser. – In Ryan pick, echoes of Obama’s selection of Vice President Biden
We can talk about Paul Ryan wanting to suck the life out of Planned Parenthood, supporting offensive “personhood” bills, and that his entitlement schemes are a disaster that impact women especially, which I’ve written about before, with the list longer than this on women’s freedoms, but this won’t be an election about that, nor will it be an election about gay rights, on which the Republican Party has an abysmal record. That Mitt Romney basically believes the same things as Mr. Ryan on these issues is a litmus test for every Republican in power today.
In fact, everything Paul Ryan stands for is what the Republican base squealed about during the primaries as one candidate after another rose to the top only to fall away, because they were show horses that couldn’t make the pitch sing. Ron Paul got part of the way there, but the pure monetary conservatism that lives in his politics is poison to today’s right, whose military fetish is tied to Middle East interventionism.
Mitt Romney is an executive first, last and only. His presidential campaign has gone from bad to ugly and sometimes down right dismal and has been in trouble all year long. He’s been thrashed by Newt Gingrich, a philandering womanizer, Rick Santorum, who was trounced in the last election he was in, Herman Cain, a nobody, and just about everyone else, in a year where the Democratic incumbent is liked, but vulnerable, because he hasn’t had an economic message for four years. But Romney’s campaign messaging, delivery and execution has failed so thoroughly that in a race he should be leading he’s losing.
Reading all the Romney reviews has been amusing and just about every one of them misses the most important point.
When Pres. Obama was elected in 2008 he came in with a Democratic majority, the press and the world at his feet and everyone believing that conservatism was dead. Remember the headlines? Try Andrew Sullivan, an Obama loyalist, on for size, circa February 2009, not long after Pres. Obama was inaugurated (bold added):
I do not agree with the headline on Sam’s piece “Conservatism Is Dead.” I do agree that the current conservative movement deserves to die; and that the Republican party deserved the massive defeats it just received. But I do not believe the conservative temperament in politics can ever truly die. it is part of human nature, nurtured to a degree of sophistication in Britain and America that is too useful to lose. I see more of it in the Obama administration right now than I do either party in Congress. This is a conservatism of no party or clique. But it is conservatism.
The Sam to which Sullivan refers is Sam Tannenhaus. Jon Meacham, when he was still at Newsweek, interviewed Tannenhaus, who said this about conservatism back in 2009:
The Republicans, so intent on thwarting Obama, have vacated the field, and left it up to the sun party to accept the full burden of legislating us into the future. If the Democrats succeed, Republicans will be tagged as the party that declined even to help repair a broken system and extend fundamental protections—logical extensions of Social Security and Medicare—to some 46 million people who now don’t have them. This could marginalize the right for a generation, if not longer. Rush Limbaugh’s stated hope that Obama will fail seems to have become GOP doctrine. This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government.
Tannenhaus wrote an essay for The New Republic that is no longer available, but which RightwingNuthouse excerpted, so I can provide a short snippet below:
But, if it’s clear what the right is against, what exactly has it been for? This question has haunted the movement from its inception in the 1950s, when its principal objective was to undo the New Deal and reinstate the laissez-faire Republicanism of the 1920s.
Ah, that part in bold. That is what William F. Buckley told Charlie Rose was the main thrust of conservatism, what it stands against. What conservatism is against was the heart of the movement, according to Buckley. It’s never been articulated what conservatism is for until the last few years, when the Tea Party started to rise.
Paul Ryan is their emissary. He is smart, articulate, and yes, extreme, at least to Democrats, especially when you look at his social views, which aren’t going to be the driving force behind the majority of people’s vote in November. Paul Ryan also represents the fulcrum of what the United States faces today, because our economy, beginning with the banks, is ruined. Yes, ruined, because another calamity is coming, so say people a lot smarter than I am on economics, starting with Neil Barofsky.
This by no means is indicative that Mitt Romney can win, because his political gifts are marginal. But he was smart enough to know that today’s right, which runs the Republican Party, is embodied in Paul Ryan who is the first person to explain modern conservatism and what it stands for, aka right wing extremism, in body, mind and spirit. You could say he’s the right’s 21st century version of Ronald Reagan, who couldn’t be elected today, because the Republican Party now is much further right than Reagan ever was.
This is the reason conservatives believe in Ryan, because they’ve never heard anything articulated like he’s done it. The American Enterprise Institute and other right wing think tanks might have written the manifesto, but no one could sell it before.
Paul Ryan has not only taken AEI’s playbook and run with it, he’s sold it to Republicans, conservatives, the Tea Party and some independents, with Mitt Romney smart enough to understand, as any good spokesperson does, see Ronald Reagan, that he needs the zealots engaged to ascend to the presidency.
David Frum thinks the pick of Ryan is all coercion and makes Romney’s job harder, Russ Douthat agrees. Nate Silver thinks it was because he was losing. William Saletan will vote for Obama, but sees the future in Ryan, because our economy is killing us and that will resound beyond this election. Major Garrett is a reporter and writes that Team Obama thinks Ryan will help drive their narrative home (see the video at the top). Michael Tomasky compares the new ticket to “Thelma and Louise,” no hyperbole there at all. Ezra Klein and Noam Scheiber come to similar conclusions, somewhere from Ryan helping to diffuse the blame if Romney bombs and being Mitt’s shot at history, both “selfish and selfless.”
Then Jonathan Chait says it’s Ryan’s party now, which means Romney’s freudian slip in introducing him as “the next president of the United States” was actually telling the truth.
Finally, we’re getting there.
Mitt Romney didn’t get to be a man on his way to billionaire status by being stupid. With no political compass, except to chart a course required to win with whatever talking points that will get him there, much like Barack Obama, Mr. Romney understands fully that as chief executive he doesn’t need to believe, but the people responsible for getting him to the top do. Because he’s seen their power and almost was taken down by it in the primary season. Seeing your own political death flash before your eyes has a crystallizing effect. Mitt Romney heard from the base what they’re against and sometimes it was him, with Paul Ryan reminding all conservatives what they are for today.
Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan because the Republican base earned it, demanded it and threatened to bolt at every step of Mitt Romney’s presidential journey toward the 2012 nomination. At every moment the Republican conservative base, while called every name in the book, demanded Mitt Romney’s fealty to the new conservative principles as set forth by Paul Ryan.
People can call it extreme. I’m a liberal and that’s exactly what I’d call it.
But it’s not just a list of what Romney-Ryan are against. It’s a litany of what they are for and what they would do.
There’s nothing in the platform or their economics on which I agree, but from the conservative catacombs of 2008 has come a movement so powerful that it has given a purpose to conservatism that it’s not had in decades. It’s an actual plan and it was carved step by step by conservatives as they put their candidates through the ideological cauldron until the salesmen that represent the ideals of the people got the pitch right.
Mitt Romney was having so much trouble that he picked the author of conservatism’s rebirth to help. It’s not the worst choice he could make. It was the only choice he had.
Pres. Obama can win this election. However, what a second term means for him and what it means for Democrats and especially progressives is not anything close to what the Republican base has accomplished by remaking the party in their image. Conservatives have driven their establishment, while the Democratic base has been ignored and vilified by Obama.
Paul Ryan was a bad pick which even a lot of conservatives who exist in the real world not the neocon fantasy work are saying. It seems that everybody forgets the voting history Ryan had while George W. Bush was in office. And cutting military spending is a high priority for most voters and Ryan’s “budget” takes 30 years to balance the budget and does not take one penny out of military spending.
Ryan is a ‘do as I say, not what I do’ Conservative. Here’s his voting record as a member of Congress during the Bush Adminstration.
1. Voted for the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in 2001 and 2003 with no offsetting budget cuts.
2. Voted to triple the Defense budget with no offsetting budget cuts.
3. Voted for the insurance industries senior prescription drug benefit with no offsetting budget cuts.
4. Voted for two wars of choice with no offsetting budget cuts.
5. Voted six times to increase the Bush debt ceiling with no offsetting budget cuts.
6. Voted for the TARP bailout of Wall Street.
7. In contrast to Romney voted for the Obama auto industry bailout since the domestic auto industry is one of the largest employers in Wisconsin.
And now he blames President Obama for all the budget deficits he helped create during the Bush Adminstrations reign that turned budget surpluses as far the eye could see into trillion dollar budget deficits as far as the eye can see.
That’s just his record on legislation passed into law and doesn’t even begin analyze his proposed legislation that hasn’t been passed into law such as more tax cuts for the wealthy while raising taxes on the middle class. Unable to just repeal Social Security and Medicare proposed legislation to hand over Social Security and Medicare to the private insurance companies.
“VOTERS DON’T VOTE on the vice presidential pick,”
That simply isn’t accurate Ms. Marsh. In the last Presidential election McCain’s pick of Grizzled Momma…OOOPS Mamma Grizzly Palin changed my McCain protest vote into a no Presidential vote for ANYone. While I realize I am my own somewhat peculiar brand of voter I can not be the only one.
Is it enough voters to make any difference? That is another story….but some voters DO vote according to VP picks.
JFK’s selection of LBJ for VP over Bobby Kennedy’s objection gave Texas to JFK. Without Texas, Nixon would have been elected President.
Romney picked Ryan because they are two peas in a pod. If Ryan’s ‘Plan for Prosperit’y budget had been enacted into law in 2001 when the GOP controlled the White House, the House and the Senate, Romney would not have had to hide his income in off shore tax shelter schemes. Romney would have paid an effective tax rate of less than 1%, not the 13.9% tax rated he paid in 2010. How would someone with more than $21 million in taxable income pay so little? Well, the vast majority of Romney’s income came from capital gains, interest, and dividends. And Ryan’s ‘Plan for Prosperity’ eliminates all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends.
Vice presidential picks help, but that’s all they do. It’s always the top of the ticket that gets it done… or not.
As for Sarah Palin, that’s an absolutely hilarious note. She did a lot more to hurt McCain in the end than aid him, but it was still John McCain who lost the election.
You could say the same thing about Illinois, but especially West Virginia, where JFK was concerned, neither of these wins having anything whatsoever to do with LBJ. They had to do with Joe Kennedy, the mob, and the unions in West VA. Again, LBJ helped immensely, probably the last time a veep actually mattered, but he didn’t win it for JFK; that was mostly his father, as well as Rose, as well as Kennedy himself. Johnson could never have had the reaction JFK did in the Nixon – Kennedy debate.
Note to all commenters: This discussion is not about Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has absolutely nothing to do with the 2012 elections or this discussion. Secy. Clinton is irrelevant to 2012. Anyone off topic and changing the subject to Clinton will be put in moderation for the duration of the 2012 election cycle. There will be no exceptions.
Terrific analysis, Taylor. You know, I really like tTomasky’s analogy of the Romney/Rand,um, I mean, Romney/Ryan ticket to Thelma and Louise:
Not only is it spot on, it made me laugh. I can just visualize Mitt kissing Ryan on the lips as they drive their convertible Rolls Royce off the cliff…
By no means, don’t anyone mistake my comment as a sign of “glee.” On the contrary, these guys really scare me and what it means for he future of our nation, especially if you are not one of the 1%. And there are many people out there who strongly believe these guys are just what we need right now…. Battleship and all in the background to hype the promise of perpetual war, which a lot of folks seem to be into now.
And I need to add a “….” to my post above which is “and take the rest of the country with them if they get elected.” which doesn’t make me laugh at all. It makes me
Ladywalker, I’m sorry, but all you are doing is singing the praises of centrist, boring, cautious policies that do nothing to solve our problems but also don’t piss off people and therefore usually lead to electoral success.
Sometimes, leaders need to lead. Which means, they need to be bold. I just wish that the Democrats’ answer to Romney-Ryan was boldness, rather than “see how dangerous they are? Better vote for us, you know we’ll NEVER do anything outside the box!”
I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but it does amaze me sometimes how a simple post expressing concern gets twisted and recast into something it is not. So far, my “fear” of the Romney/Ryan team has been misconstrued as selfishness for not thinking of future generations, glee over a bad choice, singing praises for Obama.
Believe me, my posts are NONE OF THE ABOVE!!!!
jjamele–I guess I don’t hear the singing of praises you are talking about. I am expressing fear of the Romney-Ryan ticket, not praise for Obama. But if you want to charge me with expressing that I will vote for what I perceive to be the lesser of 2 evils (Obama), then, yes, I stand guilty as charged.
I got what you’re saying, ladywalker68.
People need to understand that you can talk about Romney-Ryan without it implying anything towards Obama-Biden.
It warms my “mini-anarchist” soul when I read this:
I may not be part of the fringe left anymore. But I still have my romanticized feelings about it. And seeing what the Tea Party has been able to do validates something that we fringe left “street pounders” were saying:
We sell it right, we can do things!
You’re spot on Taylor. It’s about the salesfolk. I think many of you have said this before but a sizable number of Democrats aren’t comfortable in their own skin. So when they see the far left, even the fringe left, doing “their thing”, they get all squeamish and weird. Within the far and fringe is passion, energy, and above all IDEAS. Taking some of those ideas, packaging them right, and getting some good salesfolks is how you do “the movement”. Republicans latched on to the Tea Party and I just KNOW many were uncomfortable. But they rode it out and TADA! They got their guy in Paul Ryan. And there’s no shame in their game. Democrats, on average, roll with shame in their game. Huh??
That’s why I’m aboard the Stein/Honkala ’12 train. No shame in their game and they have some edge.
Democrats, on average, roll with shame in their game.
Sad, but true these days.
Democrats danced similarly gleefully when Reagan became the nominee as opposed to Ford. While Ryan as a VP choice is not an equivalency per se, it does remind those of us with an appreciation for the war as opposed to each battle that the message is far more significant and lasting than the messengers.
Obama is far more concerned with personal triumph than implementation of any policy. While far be from me to underestimate the influence on the national conversation the 20 posters here have on the 40 percent of the electorate that have formed no opinion of Ryan yet, if fiscal conservatives can add to the 30 year domination of the national conversation, the specific occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania matters far less
It’s not 1980 anymore. Look at the issue polls. Ryan sponsored the personhood amendment which even went down in MS of all places.
People may have formed “no opinion” of Ryan yet but once the gang from Chicago starts on him, his negatives will be sky high. I mean this is like taking candy from a baby. The bills he’s sponsored, the voting record, it’s all toxic. Romney shows once again why he is such a bad politician. Just think he could have picked someone like Susana Martinez who had not one ties to votes while Bush was in office and widened Romney’s appeal. As it was, he was stupid enough to pick someone who NARROWED the appeal of the ticket to the electorate. .
Spot on, GA6thDem. It is not 1980 any more and Romney/Ryan is no Ronald Reagan. I actually voted for Reagan once and wouldn’t vote for this ticket if they were holding a gun to my head.
I used to think that the Bush Admin was trying to turn back the clock to the 1950s. These guys are on retrograde to the days of Calvin Coolidge…
Spot on comment there. (Of course, as one of The Twenty, I’d think that, wouldn’t I?) I don’t know enough about Ryan to know that he’d be useful for helping Romney work with Congress (LBJ’s other contribution as Veep), but he hasn’t broadened his economics appeal by choosing Ryan, nor any other constituency I can think of besides the base.
casualobserver 12 August 2012 at 12:14 pm
You are dead on here.
One of my favorite sayings is, I think, apropos in the absolute astonishment and glee expressed by some Democrats over the Paul Ryan selection: “To some people, there is nothing more shocking than the discovery of a man in bloody earnest.”
Having been lulled into near-comas by politicians with bland, centrist half-promises to trim here and adjust there, we find ourselves absolutely stunned when someone is nominated for Vice President who speaks in specifics. As with Mondale’s “I’ll Raise Taxes” pledge, we decide that a form of political suicide has just taken place, and the Democrats- forgetting what a meandering, pointless waste the Obama Administration has been, what a pathetic lost opportunity 2009-10 was, shout with delight and declare “NOW we’ve got him, what an awful pick!”
I don’t agree with ANYTHING Paul Ryan stands for. But I’m not going to criticize a politician for believing in something and being straightforward and unapologetic about it. That’s a pretty rare breed these days. What I will criticize is people who crow that Romney has “blown it” by finally being transparent and up front about what he wants to do.
Know who else fits that description? My candidate, Jill Stein. I guess she deserves derision here, too.
Actually, it is refreshing to see such politicians. Sadly, though, most these days seem to be either conservatives or libertarians. At least, that’s true of the successful ones. While I find I despise the “centrist” politicians, at least the ones who are centrists because they think that the mushy middle is where all good politicians end up.
And, of course, we can understand one of the reasons why that is when we remember that progressives generally demand no better of their politicians.
jjamele 12 August 2012 at 12:48 pm
Conservatives wear their ideology proudly.
“Progressives” rebrand it, running from liberalism when conservatives attacked it, because they evidently couldn’t sell it.
The 2000 election should have been the canary in the coal mine for most liberals in this country. The republicans used tactics in Florida that had not been used in a very long time; tactics that included violence, intimidation, lies, corruption and militia like organizations to topple the general public’s will. Florida was the test case and the conservatives saw what was possible using the right techniques; techniques that have been used in other countries in recent decades but not here. In a recent opinion piece on AlterNet the writer compares the fall of Wiemar to the current situation in this country. Wealthy corporations and individuals did not think democracy was serving their needs so they worked to undermine it by supporting and funding extreme right wing political groups. This is what really brought Wiemar down. It also brought you know who to power. Koch brothers and Alec anyone?
An excellent post. Let me add that the radical right has a twin mandate to win national and congressional elections and also infect state and local politics with their ideology as an antidote to New Deal progressive policies. For four decades, the radical right could not undo the New Deal from the top down so they retooled their strategy to do so from the bottom up. Democrats were able to change the world quickly following the 1929 stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression by reelecting FDR four times; 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. The radical right methodically wormed their way into the fabric of American Politics over the past 30 years.
The radical right would rather lose than compromise; the left would rather compromise than lose. And that’s how the radical right’s policies keep winning even when their candidates lose. Even though Obama most likely will win in November Democratic values and policies will continue to compromise and continue to lose.
The radical right would rather lose than compromise; the left would rather compromise than lose.
Bingo.
Jill Stein for 2012 !! The Romney/Ryan pick has to be one of the most boring I have seen in awhile. And President Obama does not stand up for Democratic principles like helping the Unions in Wisconsin among other issues he decided to be on the sidelines on.