The jobs-themed, four-state stretch had been in
Romney's public plans for weeks, but today unfolded with the surreal yet
somewhat fitting accompaniment of Paul Ryan next to Governor Romney, two
handsome, well-chinned Midwesterners with twin coiffed brown haircuts,
advertising a revamped, joint economic plan.
The Ryan pick is thoroughly different, especially
for a deliberate thinker and planner like Romney. Since the McGovern campaign's
disaster with vice presidential candidate Tom Eagleton during the 1972 campaign
against Richard Nixon, the abiding principle for VP picks is the old medical
adage: first, do no harm.
Then-Senator Obama followed this rule to a T four
years ago when he selected fellow Senator Joe Biden as his running mate.
Simultaneously, his opponent John McCain's selection of the unprepared and
subordinate Sarah Palin caused the presidential candidate no end of grief.
Romney picking Ryan is not quite the absolute
shocker that the Palin selection was four years ago. A Romney-Ryan ticket
nonetheless signals a growing rightward trend among the Republicans,
particularly in Congress, toward Tea Party sentiment as party orthodoxy.
Ryan, a 42-year-old, seven-term congressman from
Wisconsin's 1st district, has presented himself as his party's top policy
intellectual (if such a thing even still exists in a party whose last president
so publicly prided himself on anti-intellectualism). Either way, Ryan has most
certainly become one of his party's top budget and deficit radicals.
He is a conservative's arch-conservative: he
requires that every member of his congressional staff read Ayn Rand's
pro-capitalist, pro-individualist tome Atlas Shrugged, and has pledged that he
will never cast a vote to increase the deficit, not even in a time of
war--despite a congressional voting record that says otherwise.
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What does Ryan's addition to the ticket bring to the
Romney campaign? Ryan's vice presidential candidacy may provide Romney with a
bump in the congressman's home state of Wisconsin to the tune of 2-3 percentage
points (although fivethirtyeight.com recorded Ryan on August 8 as being worth
only 0.7 percent of the Wisconsin vote).
On the other hand, nationally the Ryan pick will
likely be effective in firming up the Tea Party/right-wing party base which has
always been rather suspicious of moderate Massachusetts Mitt.
The big problem with Paul Ryan, especially with the
undecided voters who will decide this election, is his budget.
The budget Ryan took a lead in authoring and later
co-sponsored as chair of the House Budget Committee, entitled "The Path to
Prosperity," was first released as Congressional Republicans' budget
proposal for fiscal year 2012. Its proponents today include Speaker of the
House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The so-called 'Ryan plan' would save the country
from "spiraling debts" by making huge cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
Ryan's plan would turn Medicare into a private voucher system for all Americans
born after 1956, and turn Medicaid back to the states as block grants, allowing
far-right governors to do as they please with money they will certainly never
willingly give to the poor citizens it is meant for.
Paul Ryan's budget would repeal the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), as Romney has already pledged
to do multiple times throughout the campaign--even though fellow
arch-conservative Chief Justice John Roberts himself declared constitutional
the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate to purchase
private health insurance.
In addition, the Ryan budget would cut the six
existing federal income tax brackets down to just two, likely to even further
increase the concentration of wealth at the top.
Ryan's plan also includes a 50 percent cut in
non-defense discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP followed by a cap at
that drastically lowered level, but offers no potential cuts to the massive,
bloated, Cold-War era military budget.
Despite proclaiming himself as a hard-questions,
tough-positions, and honest-answers fiscal hawk, Ryan is an adherent of the old
right-wing ways of the 1970s and 1980s, still insistent on giving the Pentagon
every dollar it asks for.
Purely on economic and statistical grounds, it is
also a bad argument. Since almost 50 percent of discretionary spending every
year goes directly to the Department of Defense in the first place, cutting
non-defense discretionary spending by half is still an only 25 percent dent in
only discretionary spending, at the likely price of a complete ravaging of
America's growing lower-middle and lower classes.
(For those of you reading who are around my age,
that means never getting another Pell Grant, let alone health insurance for
when you're sick.)
The simple truth is that no budget written or backed
by the 21st century Republican Party will ever include major defense cuts, even
though the Defense Department receives between $530 and $560 billion a year,
more than any other Executive branch department. The Republican Party's major
donors simply would not allow it.
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Cut social programs, keep growing the defense
budget, and raise no taxes under any circumstances. This is the Ryan budget.
How is this supposed to be 'fresh' Republican
thinking? These have been the basic tenets of conservative Republican orthodoxy
since Governor Ronald Reagan's 1976 primary run against sitting President Ford.
Republicans proclaim Ryan to be one of their party's
key fresh faces, one of their chief men of ideas. The problem is that the
United States already tried this governing philosophy before. It was called the
Reagan administration. And the Bush administration. And then another Bush
administration.
If the meaning of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over and expecting a different result, the Ryan budget is a brutally
literal, textbook example.
Furthermore, the Ryan budget, and what Romney's
decision to pick Ryan says about Romney, plays right into what President Obama
has said throughout the campaign about Romney being all too willing to ignore
the middle class and cut needed government programs in order to give tax cuts
to millionaires and billionaires--exactly what the Ryan plan aims to do.
At least Ryan, unlike Romney, has been absolutely
clear about his policy intentions. Ryan has thousands of pages of opinions and
policy proposals available for investigation, analysis, and quotation by
strategists, reporters, and--most importantly--voters.
On the other hand, Mitt Romney has worked with both
the surgical precision of nuanced yet meaningless words, as well as with the
brute force of cover-ups and repeated lies, to avoid taking any sort of
consequential stand or position on anything.
Any stands he had taken previously in the past have
been swiftly reversed in time for the 2012 presidential campaign. He is the
softest, least specific Republican candidate since Bob Dole.
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Unusually for these types of announcements,
Republicans and Democrats are evenly split between pissed off and excited, for
varying reasons.
David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter and
conservative commentator and columnist, lost his cool on Twitter last night
upon hearing the first rumors of the Ryan pick.
"How to explain a (hypothetical!) Ryan pick by
so careful and cautious a man as Mitt Romney?" Frum wrote in multiple,
back-to-back tweets.
"Hypothesis 1) Like many Republicans, Romney
has been genuinely radicalized since 2008... Hypothesis 2) Romney camp's
internal polling shows he's not holding GOP base." He listed three more
hypotheses and invited followers to list a sixth. "May I point out that...
Obama supporters are cheering the pick?" he later noted.
Mike Murphy, Republican strategist, Tweeted that
"Paul Ryan is a star. I hope one day I will get to vote for him for
President. But right now, in this election, he's the wrong choice for VP."
Rachel Maddow claimed on her Twitter that "Paul
Ryan is the one VP pick who can unite liberal and conservative America,"
with liberals excited at the prospect of running against a budget plan that
runs all over the third rails of American politics and conservatives happy to
finally have a campaign with right-wing bona fides.
Even those
reporters and commentators with an avowedly nonpartisan, objective view
describe the Ryan pick as the most exciting, surprising, and unexpected turn in
a so-far rather humdrum presidential race, at least compared to 2008's
comparative religious revival of a campaign.
But less than
24 hours into this vice presidential pick, it is highly uncertain whether or
not the Republican Party's second surprise running mate pick in a row will turn
out for the best.
It is up to
Romney to look presidential and up to Ryan to prove himself a competent
economic pitbull for a (increasingly less) possible President Romney, whose
attitude toward decision-making--coupled with Paul Ryan's vigorous love for
policy, statistics, and the details of budgets and deficits and entitlement
spending--looks likely to lead to a sort of President Romney - Chancellor Ryan
situation, at least as far as Congressional relations go.
Watching this
novel White House unfold would be more interesting, at least, than anything coming
out of any Romney-Pawlenty or Romney-Portman administrations. Perhaps Paul Ryan
was a decent pick after all. The fundamental question now is whether or not
Romney has any chance of winning in the first place.
About the author: Ian M. MacIsaac is a staff writer for the Capital
City Free Press. He is a history major at Auburn University, and former
co-editor of the AUMnibus, the official Auburn Montgomery student newspaper.
Copyright © Capital City Free Press
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