Well if it ends up being true, Mitt will announce Paul Ryan as his running mate sometime early this morning.
So much for the “etch-a-sketch” theory. Aside from Santorum I can’t immediately think of anyone he could have plausibly picked who would signal that he’s doubled-down on his newly found extreme conservatism than Randian Ryan.
I can only conclude that the “tack-back-to-the-center-after-the-primaries” strategy is now abandoned completely. Not that Romney’s people ever sounded like that’s where they were headed anyway — most of that speculatron punditry was coming from the legions of, well, pundits, and pundits who it seems to me have yet to fully grasp how complete the colonization of the GOP now is.
Ryan has less experience in running large organizations of any kind than even Sarah Palin, if we can imagine that. No diplomatic or foreign policy experience worth mentioning at all either. He did work at McDonalds at one time, I seem to remember reading somewhere. And he did vote for TARP, the Iraq war, and Medicare part D, all of which contributed to increased spending.
I need to think about this some more, and the middle of the night, having been woken up by some critter crashing about outside (a bear, I think, stripping the berries off a serviceberry tree) is not the time to do it, but shooting from the hip here it looks like Romney is reaching for a hand grenade in an attempt to get back in the game of controlling the message. One thing this does do is sharpen the contrast between the two alternatives. Oh sure, there are others — libertarian and green candidates etc — but we all know either Obama or Romney is going to be President, so they’re not alternatives at all, but merely possible places to cast a vote. Away.
The factions who have insisted that this race be about ideology, about the contrast between preserving and improving the remnants of the New Deal, and the Randian/Austrian School vision of shrinking the public sector to as close to zero as possible, look like they have won, because that’s certainly what it’s going to be about now.
Nothing new there in principle, but it is now out in the open more than ever before. The old excuse than we have heard periodically about how Romney’s record as governor of Mass shows him to be more “liberal” than he’s sounded throughout the primary campaign now has no legs at all. He’s gone full-metal “magic hand of the market” in a pretty unambiguous way.
Ryan does come with a plan — the much fetishized “Ryan Plan” — which does indeed fill a space that has heretofore been left empty in Romney’s campaign, and he brings a certain personality into the mix, a space also unoccupied up until now. How all that might play out is beyond my clairvoyant abilities at 3 am, however..
I’ll enjoy reading your first impressions. I guess I need to bone up on Ryan’s stated positions. I do recall he’s for privatizing anything that moves, particularly Social Security, and eviscerating Medicare.
Benjamin Netanyahu was my bet.
Can I switch the Ryan portion of my tomato post to here?
Copy and paste is your friend.
It was more a moral question. Didn’t want to cheat. But since teacher has given permission:
What a choice! A really interesting choice, in the sense that it opens a door into Romney’s strange mind and throws strong light where before we supposed we knew what we were looking at but were still relying on hunch and supposition.
This is what the choice of Ryan says to me in any case: that Mittens has thought long and hard about where he is strong and where he is weak, with what sort of voters he is making headway and with what sort he is losing ground or not gaining, how he can reach the places he isn’t reaching, and he comes up with….
Ryan.
So now we know that the man looked into his soul and into the eyes of the people he has been meeting and he has come away thinking, oh god what they really need, what they are asking me for, what will swing it for me is…. ideological purity.
He thinks what he lacks is sufficient dogma. He’s gone and picked an attack dogma. A guy who has never so much as sullied the smallest of his fingers with the least smear of human empathy or human interaction.
It’s like the British in Singapore, bolting down all their heavy artillery aimed seaward. Never even thinking that they ought to defend themselves on the the landward side.
Romney thinks this is an election above all about ideology.
If he really does choose Ryan today, as the papers are saying he will, then today is the day he has lost the race. By categorically misunderstanding even the nature of the struggle in which he was engaged, much less the human beings with whom he would have had to engage in order to win.
This does solve one of Mitten’s biggest problems: he’s now shored up the vital but wavering WSJ editorial page sector.
And somewhere sister Ayn is scowling delightedly.
But the problem with selecting someone known primarily as a policy guy is that now there’s no way people won’t be looking at his policies. Until now you could only accuse Mittens from supporting them, and then he could flash the endearing rictus and temporize his mumbly way out of it. I’d think that coming out foursquare for them would be a problem with…what are they called? Oh, yeah, the independents. But that’s probably because I’m not privy to his strategy. I’m sure he’s thought it out thoroughly, and when it emerges you people who claim that he only listens to his street-buddies will see how wrong you were.
Bluth,
I thought “attack dogma” was pretty good; yes I did. We’ll see which of us manages to trademark it first, won’t we?
Good – Hopefully it will be a national debate and election about policies and achieving results that will actually help people in the long run and not just a touchy feely heartstring pulling empty promises mudfest.
And that the GOP will find a way to refute the inevitable straw man caricatures – viz Gunny
or Bluth
Expat,
Goody! Let’s skip the preliminaries and get directly to the refutation part, okay? What a load off my mind that will be if somebody actually pulls it off…
Nat – An opening gambit of Federal revenue held at 19% of GDP with spending held below that to achieve debt reduction over time is hardly shrinking the public sector to as close to zero as possible . Although I guess everything is relative.
As for having
We’ll need to see how sympathetically he plays on the big stage – and if the mud shakes off.
Are you serious? Those aren’t caricatures – they’re accurate summaries of the upshot of implementing Ryan’s budget plans. That’s as close to zero as you can get without touching non-discretionary spending. Emphasis on the ‘as possible’ part.
If you can demonstrate that Ryan’s plan is as concerned about the reducing spending part as it is about the reducing taxing part, that’ll be an encouragement. I have a strengthening suspicion that he doesn’t care if the spending reductions happen or not – because they’re basically nonsensical – provided the tax cuts for higher earners get passed.
Please, refute me. I’d genuinely like to be shown that Ryan’s plan is i) workable, ii) judicious and iii) compassionate.
Expat, have I told you lately that you come across as a complete ass?
Expat,
Well, I do have to give you that one. Any plan that balances the budget in 2040 is well and safely into “over time” territory.
But…
“As for having
‘the least smear of human empathy or human interaction.’
We’ll need to see how sympathetically he plays on the big stage…”
Can it really be that you believe that playing sympathetically on the big stage is somehow indicative of empathy or human inter-action?
Bluthner:
I’m going to apply Ockham’s Razor. What evidence is there that at any time Mittens has actually thought anything at all for himself? (Apart possibly from what underling he needs to phone to choose/get Bain to buy out a builder to solve the puzzle of lifting his Cadillacs up about 10 metres?
None I can see. Which suggests simply that his GOP minders (or whoever they are) just decided they needed someone who could articulate the slash and burn economics he can’t even get his brain around to do it for him.
The same people having set him off on the tea party path of keeping the old white religious wrinklies happy. He’s done that now (or so I imagine they think) so they just need someone to explain how they really need to screw all those undeserving poor who are so lazy and degenerate they haven’t even made their third million yet.
And it’ll work. (I mean, it has already, hasn’t it? What part of the US media has ever got very far in explaining why the Ryan plan is just a plan to keep millionaires adding to their millions and screw everybody else?)
Nat:
Well, it’s quite amazing how ‘sympathetic’ people can get, and how much empathy comes across when you have avenues of searchlights, thousands of flags, cheering people in uniforms behind you and so on.
And now, “The Leaders!” to get the empathy factor in. (I really do expect something like that at the Republican Convention. How else can they package that pair for the cameras?)
Apparently Romney’s starting his new bus trip to Tampa on an aircraft carrier. An aircraft carrier? A bus on an aircraft carrier?
Courtesy of TPM:
[See 4 below]
[Is that a flop, a flip, or a flap?]
{Oh. I see. So all that crap the Repugs have been putting about for the last four years about Obama being unqualified was, well, wrong then? Of course, the fallback line is Obama doesn’t ‘respect’ the military, isn’t it?]
Another splendid example, not of a politician facing both ways, but spinning around to face in all possible directions at once. Wow!
May drop in later; off to a Prom concert soon. (Berlioz’ Requiem. Got to get a bottle of Asti or something fizzy for picnic in the park beforehand, apparently, I’ve just been told.)
Squirrel,
Oh, I never said that play-empathy on stage doesn’t sell That would be moronic, given what we’ve been watching for years and years and the wonderful responses it so often evokes. I’m not even claiming that I’d never fall for it myself — I mean, why do we care when Othello kills Desdemona in her sleep?
I was just trying to hint that suggesting that playing empathy and having it are really the same thing is a bit…well, just a bit disrespectful to one’s own deeply felt inner humanity.
Squirrel,
Re: your # (1. TPM is probably lying. I mean, could Mittens really be dim enough to pick a guy known almost entirely for the famous Plan that bears his name, and then on the first morning blithely declare that it isn’t good enough for him?
The Asti sounds like a good idea. Especially with Berlioz.
Has anybody noticed that Ryan has Michele Bachmann eyes?
Squirrel,
I’ve (mis)spent too much time in the company of men like Romney to discount too much his ability to think. But I’ll grant you the way they think is very different from the way fully functioning human beings tend to think. He’s a numbers guy, right down to his two hundred dollar boat shoes. Which is almost certainly why he made so much money with Bain (when he was running it as well as when he was ‘not’ running it – anyone who thinks he ever stopped running it, to play governor or look after the winter olympics is just naive). Where other men saw complicated human institutions and intricate tapestries of human problems and personalities, Mitt just saw numbers. Pure numbers. He thinks, but he thinks only in numbers. I’m sure he loves his children, for instance, but I’m also pretty sure if he talks to you about them he’s going to recite their numbers. That’s what kind of man he is.
And the rest of human life – he doesn’t get it, can’t see what the fuss is about, but he knows enough to know he can’t say that out loud. So he apes what other people do and say -people he thinks he’s supposed to ape- when he knows he’s supposed to be singing and dancing along with the other children. He’s faking it to make it.
But that said I really do believe Romney thinks he chose Ryan himself, even if, as you say, the idea was more or less dictated to him by his handlers. To a guy like Romney, a guy like Ryan looks safe. Because Ryan is a numbers guy, too, or at least he seems to be. But not just a numbers guy: Ryan’s numbers seem to have ideas about human beings behind them. Utterly vicious ideas, but still- the man can talk about people when he’s talks about his numbers, and he can do it without getting confused by any of that soft stuff. (Without, you know, actually giving a shit about anyone who isn’t, you know, doing well.) Which of course Ryan is a far more despicable person than Romney. Romney simply doesn’t understand human beings except insofar as he can reduce them to numbers. Ryan almost certainly has, or once had, some capacity for empathy, but he traded it in for religion a long time ago.
Of course the only god Ryan worships -and with an evangelical fundamentalist ferocity that would put the beardiest Ayahtollah to shame- is the Hand Invisible, but, truth be told, the Hand Invisible is the god worshiped at Romney’s house, too.
The Numbers Guy and the Firebrand of the Hand Invisible.If by some catastrophe they do find themselves in charge next January, we’ll have to change the name of the Great Depression to something along the lines of ‘The Kinda Uncomfortable Economic Lull’ or something like that. And ‘Great’ won’t be anywhere near superlative enough to describe what misery they would wreck.
But in the meantime… Berlioz and Bubbly!
Bluth,
Well, I suppose you could make a case for Moloch…
Wikipedia on Ryan:
“Graduating from Joseph A. Craig High School in Janesville in 1988, Ryan was voted prom king and “Biggest Brown-Noser” by his classmates.”
Prom King and Biggest Brown-Noser!
Bim
You just know they had to have invented that superlative special only for him.
Nat,
But Moloch only wants us to sacrifice the children. Way too wimpy for the likes of Ryan.
Okay:
Well, there’s some balance in being both Prom King and Biggest Brown-Noser, and isn’t balance – straddling the inner and outer worlds – the foundation of empathy?
Bluth,
That’s like an American high school thing: biggest brown-noser, cutest couple, most likely to succeed, best-looking, strangest fucker in the entire school who isn’t outright autistic.
I’m the sure the question on all our minds is the following: has anyone gone straight from the House to the Office of the Vice President without something coming in between?
Well, the only examples I could find in the modern era were Gerald Ford and John Nance Garner. Although…neither of them were plain vanilla Representatives: Garner was Speaker of the House, Ford was minority leader.
So I don’t think Ryan’s precise path has ever been followed before. And the closest examples are a man who likened the office to a ‘bucket of warm piss‘, and a man who was only appointed because the incumbent was corrupt, and who eventually had to step up to the Big Chair because the incumbent of that office was, actually, a crook.
Omens? Not great, there, I feel.
Okay:
I made that last one up. It was actually “most unusual.” (Who knew, even if the subsequent years of movement proved it true?)
Balance… yeah maybe. It’s certainly an unusual combo.
Of course ‘prom king’ may well have been an ironic choice.
Either way, we know now which side of him won out.
Not for a while Madame – I was beginning to think you didn’t care any more
Pretty good assessment by Sean Trende:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/08/11/evaluating_the_paul_ryan_pick.html
Having read Trende and all you guys (kudos – and the copy/paste was definitely worth it, Bluth):
The #2 probably makes little difference in most cases, but choosing Ryan just speaks volumes about Mitt. Dumb-ass Biden (sorry Lefty, if you’re watching from above) appeals to a certain crowd but has never said a single thing about Obama. Ryan tells us volumes about Mitt – his world view, the people he’s comfortable with, the people he feels he can ignore. This last is a freaking screamer.
Bim,
I was there! I even won one of those superlatives myself (it was a small high school in a murky backwater of a town….) Not that I’m about to reveal which. Which is partly why I suggest he might have been the ironic choice for prom king. Not an unknown phenomenon even at my High School.
Sib,
A sign of the times. When half your delegation is elected on the Prevention of Congress platform and then claim a mandate to spend their terms trying out for spots in somebody’s wax museum, a guy who proves he can sharpen a pencil and shows a modest competence in arithmetic begins to stand out.
Bim,
That’s thoughtful article. I liked this at the end:
Bluth, it’s a great quote, but isn’t it all slightly irrelevant. It’s like saying ‘if America is sold to China for $10, the message will be that countries can be bought and sold for tuppence’.
It’s true, but it’s premised upon a conditional which is pretty damn unlikely.
Well of course Natasha, unlike everyone else here and probably the media, I am assuming that he doesn’t lack empathy or human inter-action (although I’m not sure how you manage to avoid the latter without going to live a solitary existence in a cave somewhere) but that he’ll have to perform well to overcome that inherent, when did you stop beating your wife prejudice.
Sib,
I think it was more in the way of saying, yeah okay Ryan is a revealing pick, and could conceivably seem like a h smart pick – if you are Romney- (that was the rest of the article) but in the end it’s not likely to be a winning strategy. But saying it in a colorful way…
Expat,
Be fair, we aren’t prejudiced against Ryan. We merely dislike him intensely because of everything he works very hard to communicate to us that he believes and stands for, and because of the regime he so volubly wants to enforce upon our country.
A good start: Mitt introducing Ryan as the future president of the United States
Di -
Apparently that’s how Obama introduced Biden when he chose him as VP. So maybe /mittens does have a sense of humor buried in there somewhere.
I’m thinking that things are looking better for third parties.
Expat,
See, that wasn’t human inter-action, it was human inter-action. Intended to evoke things* passing between human beings, not mere presence in their midst. Like, for instance, if somebody knew about that stuff and proposed to end Medicare anyway, he’d say it regretfully, without that Randian dismissal of the country’s detritus with its implied “now they’ll finally get what’s coming to them.” See? I mean, he’d offer up a token “But don’t worry, here’s how grandma can still pay to fix her bedsores” or some such, convincing or not. But you’ll never hear that from him, will you? Not because he wouldn’t say it if he thought it would help. Because it just doesn’t occur to him.
He likes to talk about how his grandmother got Alzheimer’s and his family had to take her in, and how he learned something from it. What did he learn? “Live life to its fullest, because you never know how long it’s going to last.”
* Besides cash, I mean.
Of course, I just may be slandering him with that “Randian dismissal’ snark. Has he not recently said of Rand, “I reject her philosophy… It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.”
Gee. How did I get that so wrong? Hmmm, here he is to explain that: “‘You know you’ve arrived in politics when you have an urban legend about you, and this one is mine,”
Ah. Urban legend. That would explain it. And a more than usually baseless one, too, because all there is to back it up are these bare snippets that could mean anything:
On second thought — I wonder if the rest of the country’s bag men might not be worrying that public lying on such a scale could give their profession a bad name.
Yeah, don’t you just hate those urban legends that people make up? Like the one about Mittens thinking universal health care was a good idea for the whole country, or the one about him being solidly pro-choice…
The only interesting question is will enough independent voters be paying enough attention to understand how deeply these two men are insulting them.
Bluth,
“…will enough independent voters be paying enough attention…”
Well, they are the people who like to boast that nobody’s ideology will ever stick to them. Oh, yeah, and “character counts” works pretty well with them too.
I forget to mention (may Madame forgive me) who Ryan gave the credit for his character to, after he renounced Ayn:
Just about perfect, though a skeptic could always ask what anybody’s epistemology (and especially Aquinas’s) has to do with “the moral case for capitalism and individualism.”
Natasha,
Ryan has always sounded like a complete tool to me. But, really, is that a problem in American politics?
I think he’s trying to tell us that it was an Angel who told him to read all that Ayn Rand.
Bluth,
Well, as I (dimly) recall, Aquinas argued for two sources of human knowledge, both deriving from God: revelation (which of course he wouldn’t deny but did acknowledge to be rare) and the mental manipulation of remembered sense perceptions, which we can do because God designed our minds to be able to cope with the secondary, limited kind of thinking that doesn’t rely on what He has directly revealed (this part was in large part a crib from Aristotle). All of which was pretty milk toast in his day. It made up only the teensiest part of Aquinas’s writings and would have been long forgotten — because it was so conventional — if it had been all he had to say. How anybody could read it and then think it had somehow molded his views on anything at all is beyond me — or would be if I didn’t know that Ryan was just saint-dropping.
Bim,
Of course there’s no political downside to you or me or any of us here thinking that Ryan sounds like a complete tool.
But what might resonate more widely would be the details of his Plan, which are now matters for the front page. E.g., gutting Pell Grants to finance a new (on top of Bush’s) average $265,000 tax break on incomes over $1m. E.g., indexing the medical benefits he doesn’t just eliminate to general inflation and not the cost of medical care itself.
That’s the kind of thing that does have a chance to penetrate the public skull, once it’s actually competing for eyeballs with Kim and Khloe. And now it will be.
Nat, as usual a much more nuanced view. I’m pretty sure Aquinas spent quite some little time nailing down what species of knowledge angels possessed as well (something like God’s knowledge, but not as complete, something like human knowledge but without sensory input), but me I was just going for the crude juxtaposition of one Angel handing Joesph Smith the Book of Mormon, and another one handing Mr Ryan the Book Rand.
Yeah, we all know the truth is he just pulled a saint out of his… er… hat. Just as he knows the general reaction to a sentence like the one he put it in is quite likely to be, “E-pistol-what?
Or at least he pulled it out of a place very near to the place out of which Mr. J Smith pulled the book of Mormon. Funny how both the Mormon screed and the scribbles of Rand are both just about equally as (un)profound, and equally (un)illuminating of the human condition.
Or, alas, not funny at all.
Bluth,
Yeah but there’s a difference.
Romney isn’t running on “the Mormon screed” but Ryan ran for years on Rand’s, in the “want to know who I am? Read Ayn Rand” sense.
Now he says he’s thrown her over for Political Thomism (which is at least a novelty) but I do think he’ll have to wink and nod in her direction to keep her crowd’s heads from exploding. Whether he does or not, his Randian past is fair game in a way that Romney’s (and Reid’s and the Udalls’) religion isn’t (as electoral invective, I mean),
Nat,
true dat. I’m banking however on Ryan being such a True Believer in the Hand Invisible (as channelled by Rand) that he won’t be able to hold himself to a wink and a nod.
And then, as Romney’s religion is also Hand Invisible, it’s gonna be hard for them to resist turning their campaign into one big revival meeting. In the old days they could’ve talked out one side of their mouths to the chosen, and out the other side to the unsaved, but in this case at least, we can thank the lord of Media for 24/7 coverage. They is what they is and no saint Aquinas can cover up what they is with his ragged, moth-eaten and ink-stained wings.
Niftily written, informative, and entertaining piece on Ryan here in Esquire.
I’m very hazy now about Aquinas. (Did read some as a schoolboy, part of the neighbourhood Jesuit priest’s appeal to the Italian genes of an inquisitive squirrel to get him out of heresy into the true path.) Couldn’t get on with it though.
I’ve been more than puzzled, though, as to why he seems to have become the US right-wing’s patron saint of late. (That Texas school board thing, where they were insisting on schoolkids being taught Aquinas?) I remember, at least, his definitions of ‘a just war’, which, as far as I recall, included very good reasons for not starting one in the first place, not taking it too far, and negotiating to stop one. None of which seems really to jibe wit the current Republican right wing.
However, having perused Wikipedia, I begin to see why. (One has ro remind oneself that these Ryanesque ‘great intellects’ actually seem to derive their knowledge from very abbreviated ‘Coles Notes’ on Aquinas . . .
Thus, I presume, the sort of thing they think makes up Aquinas’ thought are snippets like these:
or (Bertrand Russell’s summary) his reasons for the indissolubilty of marriage:
Now that makes sense in this context, doesn’t it? You can even vaguely see how, simplified like this, it might even gel with Ayn Rand. (Of whose notions I only have second-had knowledge and no desire whatever to improve on it.)