Devil’s advocacy time.
There’s no shortage of punditry from the usual suspects salivating that Romney’s pick of Ryan increases Obama’s chances of reelection. Because Rand! Medicare! Social Security! etc! etc!…
Perhaps. We shall see. But then again perhaps they’re underestimating just how effective Ryan’s style can be, and how it just might give the Obama campaign fits. That group of folks in US politics generally referred to as “liberals” often make mistakes like that, and often by assuming that truth will out and rationality will prevail. Truth, they congratulate themselves, has a liberal bias.
Perhaps it does, but US politics is not an exercise in truth or rationality, but in marketing.
For people like me, who regard the fundamentals of the Austrian School/Randian vision as spectacularly flawed — particularly in view of the complexity of modernity and the changes that modernity must face by reason of changing baselines for energy, resources, populations, and general planetary conditions — this is a no-brainer. I never was going to vote for Romney, and picking Ryan merely glues the needle on the chance-o-meter to the “zero” peg, but this election is not about the likes of me, and the campaigning that we are about to endure is not aimed in my direction at all.
Let’s get real, if a character so obviously flawed as Dubya can be winningly marketed as Presidential material, then damn near anything’s possible. And Ryan is no bumbling, language-mangling dipshit like Dubya. He’s articulate, mentally organized, knows his material, and quick on his extemporaneous feet, all things that Dubya decidedly was not.
This election will be decided not by what’s actually in the box, but by the appeal of the packaging. And looked at in that superficial way, the packaging, that is to say Ryan’s presentation, is pretty good, and pushes a lot of Americans’ Pavlovian comfort buttons. Exactly what good marketing is supposed to do. (One could say the same about Obama in ’08 with equal validity. Different set of buttons though.)
(In passing let’s observe that the Wikepedia page “political positions of Paul Ryan”, which the google linked to, just displayed as “this page has been deleted”. It’s Etch-a-Sketch time.)
There are plenty of places where Ryan won’t help, and might hurt. He’s socially conservative on what are now called “women’s issues”, but realistically Romney has already pissed on that campfire effectively all by himself, so no matter who he chose would not help him much there. So women go under the bus, what else is new? His tax stance is problematic too, but Romney could just say he’d revisit that later, and Ryan could nod approvingly. They don’t have to mean it.
So what has he been saying recently, and how has he been saying it, that could win more votes than it loses?
“Simply put, I don’t believe the preferential option for the poor means a preferential option for big government.” (Georgetown University speech, April 2012)
This rings the Randian warning buzzer for those that have one, but it’s an outlier in a way too. It caught my eye because of the phrase “preferential option for the poor”, which is a slogan with a halfway dignified pedigree, arising out of the (mostly) Latin American phenomenon known as the Liberation Theology movement.
Ryan is a Catholic, of course. Here he’s actually invoking words arising from a Catholic movement which (in part, at least) evolved into seeking to address poverty through activism, including political activism, though that’s not Ryan’s angle at all. Ryan’s on board with then Cardinal Ratzinger’s vehement oppositional narrowing of the concept to simply meaning that it’s “God’s love” that shows preference for the poor, and the Church should eschew any attempt to take things any further than that. I’m mangling history by condensing dangerously, because it’s complicated, but I don’t care today about that.
Ryan, like any Rand fan worth their salt, opposes government involvement in social programs as a matter of personal ideology and only grudgingly accepts the political necessity for government to stop bodies piling up in the street (visibly, anyway) when times are tough. But grudging acceptance is still acceptance, and while the d’s can whack away at him over his willingness to slash Medicare, he can reply that they, too, have proposed funding cuts there, and that they, too have pronounced it to be in crisis. The devil’s in the details, but Presidential campaigns are not amenable to wonkish deconstructions of fine points like that. He can punch back, and he will.
Then there’s a whole boatload of more standard political rhetoric, but it’s well calibrated not to appear scary;
“Get our spending under control, balance our budget, prevent the debt from getting out of control and reform the Tax Code to create jobs and growth from this economy and get people back to work. Economic growth, and spending control and entitlement reforms are the key recipe of what we are trying to do to prevent this debt crisis from happening. And we think the next president and the next Congress will basically decide how this all goes.” (Fox NewsJuly 2012)
“If you don’t address these issues now, they’re going to steamroll the country. And the issue is, the more you delay fixing these problems, the much uglier the solutions are going to have to be.” (CNN, Sept. 2011)
“We had the highest poverty rates we’ve had in a generation. One in six Americans are in poverty today. These policies are making it worse. So why should we keep throwing money at failed programs? And what we’re saying is, ‘Let’s reform these programs and get people off of welfare and back to work.” (Fox News, March 2012)
And just a hint of red meat (convicts are pretty useful sometimes);
“We think you have to get savings in some of these areas where you’ve had a huge increase in spending. We have prisoners getting food stamps in Wisconsin. (True, actually, but Ryan dishonestly neglects to mention that it’s illegal, so it’s fraud, not profligate legislation.) We have people that are becoming eligible for food stamps because of other factors that aren’t eligible food stamps in and of themselves. So we think we need to fix the fact that some of these programs have grown at such unsustainable rates.” (Think Progress, May 2012)
We’re talking about how well he’s marketing, remember, not what it would all actually mean if put into practice by today’s GOP. This is not chopped liver at all, it’s powerful stuff that pushes a lot of pleasure buttons not just with the rabid base, but with a much wider segment of the population. A segment, not incidentally, that has been softened up for years now with artillery barrages designed to do just that.
Look! — We’re coddling convicts with food stamps!! — Poverty is caused by government!! — Jobs are scarce because; taxes!! — We’re on the edge of a debt cliff, because; Government spending!!! (On the poor and undeserving, naturally, not war or giveaways to heavy hitters or any shit like that.)
Whatever.
The widespread opinionating in the liberal blogosphere that he’s so toxic as to make an Obama win more likely (a “delicious target”, says Tomasky) could play out to be horribly mistaken. Sure, eviscerating Medicare and privatizing Social Security are tough sells anywhere, so you don’t sell them like that, you sell “saving America”. And look! It’s not just us! Even the current president has acknowledged there’s a problem!
And you make damn sure to grandfather the status quo in for long enough that old and middle-aged farts won’t be affected and scared over to the socialist Kenyan. There’s no political way that expenditures could be slashed right out from under current or imminent recipients anyway — which means the argument that it’s necessary to prevent immediate fiscal calamity is nonsense.
But that’s just another detail, and we’re not about to go into wonky detail mode, of that we can be sure.
My instinct, which is worth exactly what you pay for it, is that it’s a closer race now. I don’t think Ryan will be the liability a lot of folks are saying he is, not unless the d’s up their marketing game beyond anything we’ve seen so far, even with their recent improvements in that area.
There’s an unprecedented avalanche of PAC money about to deluge us all, and we know exactly how it will be directed.
We shall see.
[ding!] Aha! Time to pull that chicken out of the oven. Onward.
Tommy. Got the numbers from historic trend data from IEO. Total energy consumption use averaged over the last couple hundred years comes out to about a 2.9% annual growth rate.
However, you are correct — projected usage growth rates are lower.
So OK, lets use the projected 1.6% as the rate of energy consumption growth. That gives a doubling time of about 43.7 years, which means we will be using twice as much energy in less than 45 years. Not in my lifetime, but certainly in my kid’s, never mind any potential grandkids.
If that 1.6% growth rate were to be maintained, we would be using four times today’s energy by the year 2100, even as supplies of the kind of energy our entire modernity was built with and currently depends upon are declining and/or harder to extract and with much lower EROI’s.
There are energy alternatives to petroleum products, sure, but most of them generate electricity. We’re nowhere near ready to deploy battery powered OTR semi-trucks. Rail is the best bang for the energy buck when it comes to moving heavy shit (and lots of people too) on land, because you can run that electrically, and we can buy time by generating electricity without petroleum, but expanding rail freight lines and service ain’t even on the table.
We are also welded to an industrial agriculture which can literally and accurately be described as a method of turning petroleum into food, such is its dependance on oil. Big problems looming there with the cost of food, obviously.
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And EP, none of this is even addressing climate change, which you’re calling global warming. I even specifically said that in my previous post, but yet you include it in your response.
But sure, the economic consequences of progressively scarcer vital resources (that we need exponentially more of in order to grow economically) will bite long before thermodynamic limits. Which is kinda my point. That’s what will happen. I say it’s already happening. Climate change, if we want to throw that into the mix, merely accelerates the time frame by making shit more expensive even more quickly. Food, for example, as we are seeing right now and have been for a good while.
So it’s like Mission Impossible, that old TV show; “Your task, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to describe in detail how a consumption-based modernity built with, and to depend upon, cheap energy (and energy from a uniquely versatile source, too — oil) can successfully move into a future of increasingly expensive energy (from progressively different and much less versatile sources) while at the same time maintaining an exponential growth rate in its economy sufficient to support the system of loans and interest upon which that depends.
This comment will self destruct in 10…9…8…7
Gunny – change in inevitable. The question is – will you like it?
Tell me what you want to call it Gunny. It will make communication so much easier.
Sure change is inevitable, and very often it’s completely outside of our abilities to influence what and when.
But this is shit we can see coming, without any doubt whatsoever, and ain’t nobody going to like it. Even as we may fuss, and should fuss, about the details.
And the possible mitigation of that something is in large part a matter of engineering and technics, both as a matter of innovative ideas for new approaches, and a matter of quitting a bunch of crap that we know , know, is accelerating the problems and compromising our options in the future.
This is part that baffles the shit out of me, that you, as an engineer, would be so sanguine as that.
But, hey ho, it is what it is. I’m quite used to being baffled.
But it fucking infuriates me that we have clowns like Romney and Ryan, and yes, Obama and most of the rest too, in positions of authority but playing harmful theatrical games to protect the short term interests of that tiny fraction of humanity that has amassed the political and economic power to steer our whole goddam system of governance in precisely that direction.
This is not the right time in history for bankers, usurers, and self-interested industrialists to be making choices about our future. It just isn’t. We’d get better results with grade-schoolers calling the shots.
Best. Episode. Ever.
Although the best part is where Romney tears off his face to reveal…well, that would be spoiling things…
Good thoughts, gunny. Not sure I’ve properly made those links before for myself.
And EP, you have the question wrong. You should have asked, ‘change is inevitable, the question is, what colour is it?’
So you’re in a hurry, downtown, it’s too late to take the bus and far too long a journey to walk, so you flag a taxi.
A taxi stops, you get in, you tell him the address, he stomps on the gas and off you go.
At some point you realize that a few pedestrians are waving frantically, they seem to be trying to tell you to slow down. But the driver takes no notice, and barrels on.
Then, to your horror, you see, up ahead, that the bridge over the river is out. It’s collapsed midway. Your driver can’t possibly not see what you see, but he’s still got his foot down, still barreling along towards the bridge.
You bellow: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING CAN”T YOU SEE THE BRIDGE IS OUT??!!
He turns, smiles at you (through the partition that is going to stop you strangling him) shrug and says, “change is inevitable”.
And you know what, ‘change is inevitable’ just is one of those rare phrases that really does roll of the tongue so much better in German:
Wandel ist Unvermeidlich
It would look so… appropriate in iron lettering over iron gates. And it’s so useful! If the jellyfish wins in November, and the cry goes up from the old folks: but the vouchers won’t cover it! And courts across the land begin to hear the refrain, but my children where hungry! And peaceful protesters who are locked up from coast to coast cry out, but I’m a corporation too! the Ryomneyfish will simply shrug it’s jelly shoulders and say: Wandel ist Unvermeidlich!
Getting into Godwin land Bluther
Of course change is inevitable, in so many, many ways.
First, nothing costs exactly $20. So very, very often lunch comes to $21.62, all you’ve got are two twenties, and the waitress has nothing but singles and quarters. But, see, it’s still optional: you could always leave her an eighteen dollar and twenty-eight cent tip, but not after you waited twenty minutes for another cup of coffee…
Second, time itself cannot be measured without change at some physical level, be it just the movement of neurons or quarks. I mean, how to we know that the universe doesn’t constantly stop its twitching and a million years don’t pass between each moment we can sense – or would pass, if there were some way to measure them? (Sorry, Bergson,,,)
So change is inevitable, and at a personal level too. I, for instance, was ever so surprised yesterday to be suddenly called upon to lead an expedition to the moons of Jupiter. We blast off today. It will take us years and years but because we’ll be traveling at negative light speed – I confess that the physics of this are a bit beyond me – it will seem to you earthlings as though a mere week has passed before I return. I’m sure I’ll remember to check back in here then.
Nat,
I hope and trust that you have some amiable company on your expedition to Jupiter. Just be careful when you get to the moment where you have to wind down from negative light speed. That deceleration can sneak up on body. Gently gently…
Let’s see now…
If y’all are nothing but constructs within the mind of bim_ballace, then none of this really means anything or matters. If death, disability and destruction – not to mention deconstruction – are just just thoughts in the bim_noggin, what’s there to worry about?
I guess this also means it’s okay to get mean and nasty from time to time (whatever “time” might mean) on Cif, since it’s only mental constructs that might be offended. And what a wonderful mind it is, populated by all these sensitive, sentient creatures, not to mention kittens and avocados!
Okay, I feel better. Change, she is a comin’, but it’s likely just a change in my mental state. Woo-hoo. I’ve always known all this self-involvement was good for something.
You lost me, Bim. Meta shit is too meta for my earth bound brain to grasp.
Nat, lucky you. Escaping the election for even a week can do wonders to restore sanity.
Sorry, Amy. It’s just this longterm fascination with solipsism – since I was a kid – and its roots. (Long story, that.) I did it a lot on Cif because I was always so irked.
It’s basically this: the whole “meta,” deconstructivist, postmodern thing eventually gets back to the mind – one’s own mind – doing the spinning, like a particularly vicious washing machine.
It lingers, despite a growing interest in the pleasures of the flesh – avocados and such.
The “y’all” was a nod to everyone’s favorite American politician: Joe Biden.
I love Joe Biden. Seriously.
Yeah, well, Biden’s no solipsist. I’ll give him that.
Biden may not talk the talk so well, but he walks the walk. this matters to me.
There are just so few American politicians I can stand, and they’re all kind of on the fringes: Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold, Barbara Lee. Jill Stein, of course.
Time to get going here, I suppose…
I’d vote for Bernie. I’d vote for Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich (we share a birthday) too.