9 Reasons Romney's Choice of Paul
Ryan for Veep Is Smarter Than You Think
Continued from previous page
August 12, 2012 |
When Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney tapped Paul Ryan, the 42-year-old Wisconsin
congressman, to be his running mate, progressives went on a happy-thon. That
Romney chose the House Budget Committee chairman known as the architect of
draconian budgets that would make huge cuts in every aspect of the safety net
-- not to mention his quest to turn Medicare into a voucher program -- just
seemed like major blunder. My colleague, Joshua Holland, called it Romney's
biggest mistake. Many were gleeful and shocked that Romney would seemingly play
right into the Obama message on how the Romney agenda harms the middle class.
But I wasn't so
happy. The Romney decision signals several things about the future, and none of
them good -- rather scary and ugly, as a matter of fact. My gut told me that,
for the Republican vice presidential candidate, I would much rather have a
non-entity like Portman or Pawlenty as the Republican than a right-wing rock
star. Any day.
Progressives
are right when they say Ryan represents everything that shows how out of touch
the Republicans are with the needs of the country. But they are not looking at
Romney's Ryan decision for what it is -- a hugely dangerous step toward getting
the Koch brothers' hand-picked star right to the verge of the presidency,
which, if it should it come to pass, could dramatically transform the nature of
American politics for our lifetimes. Whether Romney wins or loses, the Ryan
pick poses a threat to the well-being of the nation.
If Romney wins,
then Ryan occupies the Number Two spot with a money base and huge constituency
of his own, far more than any vice president has ever enjoyed. With his own
leadership PAC and a close relationship to the Koch-funded Americans For
Prosperity astroturf group, it is hard to imagine how Ryan doesn't immediately
become a co-president or, at least, the most powerful VP in history. And, and
this is a win-win for Charles and David Koch, the right-wing billionaire
brothers: If Romney loses, then Paul Ryan is sitting pretty to be the nominee
in 2016, when there is no incumbent....a far easier race to win after eight
years of President Barack Obama, the Democrat, presiding over a difficult
economy whose recovery Republicans have done everything they can to obstruct. I
have always felt that many conservatives intent on taking over this country,
known for their long vision and patience, have this strategy.
And on the ugly
side, the choice of Ryan says this Romney campaign, in contrast to even the
McCain campaign, will be a no-holds-barred, vicious personal attack on Obama
and everything associated with the Democrats -- scapegoating unions, public
employees, poor people, immigrants, people characterized by Ryan as the "takers, not the makers [3]." This is the way the
conservatives know how to win campaigns, and they are going all out to rip the
Dems to shreds. If it doesn't quite work in in this year's presidential race,
they could very well control of both houses of Congress come January.
Here are nine
reasons that Romney pulled the trigger on Ryan, and why they make a lot of
sense:
1. Romney was
in danger of losing badly, so a gamble was worth the risk.
The polls and
trends were going in the wrong direction as Obama was ahead by 9 percent among
all voters and 11 percent among independents. As Michael Goodwin writes in the New York Post [4]:
Romney was on course to lose the
election...perhaps by a landslide...Independents, despite being unhappy with
Obama, were even more unhappy with Romney. And too many Republicans remain
unenthusiastic about their party's nominee.
So Romney had
to do something to energize the campaign, or he was dead in the water. Pick
Ryan.
2. Romney is
now seen as bold. By picking a controversial choice, a young, mediagenic, so-called brainy
numbers guy, and one loved by the conservative base, Romney passed up the
gaggle of more boring white guys who populated the pundits' predictions, to
pick the radical one. But here, in fact, Romney has it both ways. Ryan is not a
Palin or a Rubio -- a wild card -- but rather a well-positioned Republican with
major mainstream and corporate credibility, whom the media often has gone ga-ga
over. And Ryan is an insider -- Erskine Bowles (the co-chair of the
Bowles-Simpson Deficit Commission, and rumored to be the next Secretary of the
Treasury), has lavished lots of praise on to Ryan, who served on the
commission, as have many others.
3. Did I
mention Ryan is Catholic? We hear how the conservative Catholic bishops are trying
to push Catholic voters to Romney, who has obviously come late to his
anti-abortion stance. And among Catholic voters, Romney's Mormonism isn't
exactly a plus. Still any anti-abortion politician is better than Obama in the
bishops' minds. For the bishops, their task became easier with Ryan (even if
they have a problem or two with his budget proposal), who is as conservative as
they come, being against abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Those
Catholics who are inclined to vote conservative are now very excited. And, in
fact, it's not just far-right Catholics to whom Ryan appeals. A lot of voters
in this country, for some reason, really like candidates who stick to rigid
principles, even if those principles contradict their own. Ryan will get some
of those voters.
4. Romney now
has even more money. Romney has been doing fine, raising hundreds of millions
from investment bankers and other pots of big wealth from the 1/10th of the top
1 percent. Still the Ryan choice is a huge motivator to the group of rabid
right-wing billionaires around Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers
who fund and raise money for right-wing candidates, and an array of right-wing
groups. Ryan has been a Koch favorite for years, supported and featured in
myriad ways. The Kochs have promised, with Karl Rove, to raise $400 million for
the so-called "independent superPACs". Now, with all those
billionaires jazzed over Ryan, the sky may be the limit. There is talk of the
superPACs and the Romney campaign raising and spending $1.2 billion -- and now
maybe even more.
5. Romney gets
the full Koch election infrastructure. Solidifying the alliance with the
Kochs is even more about infrastructure than campaign dollars, which will be
plentiful. As my colleague Adele Stan, who covers the Kochs and conservative
election field operations, explains:
The Kochs, via Americans for Prosperity
and Faith and Freedom Coalition, own the infrastructure for the ground game in
the swing states. They've been building it for years. That's not something any
amount of money can build in the three months leading up to the election.
Romney really, really needs Koch buy-in.
5. Ryan seals
the deal for a base-motivating campaign in the worst tradition of the
Republicans. Republicans
win when they run to their base, and play the "us versus them" card
for their anxious constituencies. Voter suppression tactics of all sorts are in
play, especially in Florida and Pennsylvania. Taken together, Ryan's earnest
demeanor and brutal budgets act as an a elixir for grassroots conservatives;
the base will now be super-motivated.
Bush won two
terms without winning the majority of the popular vote because the GOP wanted
the win more than the Democrats -- and Republicans cheat more. As Thomas
Schaller writes at Salon [5]:
By picking [Ryan], Romney provides a
powerful signal that he is willing to counter Obama's failed attempt to unite
America with an unapologetic attempt to win via econo-demographic divide and
conquer politics.
6. The Romney
campaign will now be the most brutal, race-tinged, fact-absent, expensive,
technologically sophisticated campaign ever run. This presidential race is increasingly
polarized. Polling shows that Obama has lost most of the non-college-educated
white male voters he was able to capture in 2008. As Charles Blow points out [6] in the New York Times:
A staggering 90 percent of Romney
supporters are white. Only 4 percent are Hispanic, less than 1 percent are
black and another 4 percent are another race.
And of
uncommitted "swing" voters, Blow writes:
Nearly three out of four are white. The
rest are roughly 8 percent blacks Hispanics and another race.
Schaller adds:
"Don't be surprised in the Romney-Ryan ticket engages in the sort of racially
tinged, generationally loaded entitlement politics practiced by the Tea
Party..."
7. While the VP
pick isn't going to change the mind of many independent or hard-core party
voters, it is a move to bring all elements of the party in sync. Progressive pundits, just a few days
ago, were saying: Oh, the VP pick doesn't make much difference...maybe, at
best, a 2 percent swing. Today is apparently a new day, and progressives are
pouncing on this choice as being a huge plus for Obama. Well, ya can't have it
both ways. Republican wins are always about turning out the base to the polls.
Ryan probably won't make that much difference on the large scale, but he
becomes the thunderbolt to rouse the base, which appears to love him, even if
he is a media-created fraud. In fact, Ryan may be the most effective political
phony in America.
8. Repeat: Paul
Ryan is the most effective phony in American politics today. When Romney picked Ryan, he was
grabbing one of the great teflon politicians of all time. Ryan has a tremendous
ability to appear earnest while lying through his teeth, as he did recently
when he repeated Romney's lie about Obama and welfare work requirements. Ryan
represents what Salon's Joan Walsh calls [7]the "fakery at the heart of the
Republican project today." She adds:
[Ryan,] the man who who wants to make
the world safe for swashbuckling, risk-taking capitalists hasn't spent a day at
economic risk in his life.
Guys like Ryan
"somehow become the political face of the white working class when they
never spent a day in that class in their life," writes Walsh. He has, she
says, a "remarkable ability to tap into the economic anxiety of working
class whites and steer it toward paranoia that their troubles are the fault of
other people -- the slackers and the moochers, Ayn Rand;'s famous 'parasites'
..."
9. The
Conservative tribe is now ready to fight all of its enemies. The conservatives and Republicans know
what team they are on -- and that tribal identity is more important to them
than any idea of hegemonic cultural identity could possibly be to liberals. For
one, the conservative team is almost totally white, and far more homogenous,
while more than 43 percent of Obama's supporters are people of color. Add in
that conservative brand of resentment -- the "makers versus the
takers" -- and it becomes clear who represents the conservative notion of
a "maker." With Ryan as the standard-bearer for the self-described
"makers," the team has its galvanizer.
The social
psychologist Jonathan Haight and his researchers have compiled a catalog [8] of "six fundamental ideas that
commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority
and sanctity."
Among them, he
finds that group loyalty and identification is important among conservatives,
but not among liberals. As William Saletan describes Haidt's thesis [8] in the New York Times Book Review:
Social conservatives see welfare and
feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party [9] hates redistribution because it
interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor,
chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral
foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on
care and fighting oppression.
Come election
time, that array of values makes the Republican project more formidable. It is
why, when conservative ideas are not popular, when significant majorities of
Americans disagree with conservatives, they still have enormous capacity to
exercise outsized influence, controlling much of the public debate -- and are
on the doorstep of winning control of all three branches of government. Despite
their minority status, the tribal thing still leverages far more power than is
fair or many thought possible.
In the end, it
doesn't really matter whether Romney picked Ryan out of desperation, or may
have had to take Ryan as a deal for support from the Kochs, or may have felt
Ryan was actually the best man for the job. Whatever the reason, the Ryan pick
does a whole lot for the Romney campaign --conferring money, authority, media
attention, change of tone, and more. Probably the most overarching plus,
though, is that by adding Ryan, Romney has brought the whole
Republican-conservative tribal deal together, which, from my vantage point only
increases -- not decreases -- the chance of the Republicans defeating Obama in
November.
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/9-reasons-romneys-choice-paul-ryan-veep-smarter-you-think
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