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Tuesday, August 28, 2012

6 Right-Wing Zealots and the Crazy Ideas Behind the Most Outrageous Republican Platform Ever



ELECTION 2012  


They're breaking out the crazy down in Tampa.

 
Kris Kobach

The official 2012 Republican Party platform is a far-right fever dream, a compilation of pouting, posturing and policies to meet just about every demand from the overlapping Religious Right, Tea Party, corporate, and neo-conservative wings of the GOP. If moderates have any influence in today’s Republican Party, you wouldn’t know it by reading the platform. Efforts by a few delegates to insert language favoring civil unions, comprehensive sex education and voting rights for the District of Columbia, for example, were all shot down. Making the rounds of right-wing pre-convention events on Sunday, Rep. Michele Bachmann gushed about the platform’s right-wing tilt, telling fired-up Tea Partiers that “the Tea Party has been all over that platform.”

Given the Republican Party’s hard lurch to the right, which intensified after the election of Barack Obama, the “most conservative ever” platform is not terribly surprising. But it didn’t just happen on its own. Here are some of the people we can thank on the domestic policy front.

1. Bob McDonnell.

As platform committee chair, McDonnell made it clear he was not in the mood for any amendments to the draft language calling for a “Human Life Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution and legal recognition that the “unborn” are covered by the 14th Amendment (“personhood” by another name). McDonnell is in many ways the ideal right-wing governor: he ran as a fiscal conservative and governs like the Religious Right activist he has been since he laid out his own political platform in the guise of a master’s thesis at Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

His thesis argued that feminists and working women were detrimental to the family, and that public policy should favor married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators.” When running for governor of Virginia, McDonnell disavowed his thesis, but as a state legislator he pushed hard to turn those positions into policy. As the Washington Post noted, “During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women.” As governor, McDonnell signed the kind of mandatory ultrasound law that is praised in this year’s platform. When his name was floated as a potential V.P. pick, Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood decried his “deeply troubling record on women’s health.”

2. Tony Perkins.

Perkins heads the Family Research Council, whose Values Voter Summit is the Religious Right’s most important annual conference, where activists rub shoulders with Republican officials and candidates. Perkins bragged in an email to his supporters how much influence he and his friend David Barton (see below) had on the platform. Perkins was an active member of the platform committee, proposing language to oppose school-based health clinics that provide referrals for contraception or abortion, and arguing for the strongest possible anti-marriage equality language. Perkins also introduced an amendment to the platform calling on the District of Columbia government to loosen its gun laws, which Perkins says still do not comply with recent Supreme Court rulings.

The media tends to treat Perkins, a telegenic former state legislator, as a reasonable voice of the Religious Right, but his record and his group’s positions prove otherwise. Perkins has been aggressively exploiting the recent shooting at FRC headquarters to divert attention from the group’s extremism by claiming that the Southern Poverty Law Center was irresponsible in calling FRC a hate group. Unfortunately for Perkins, the group’s record of promoting hatred toward LGBT people is well-documented. Perkins has even complained that the press and President Obama were being too hard on Uganda’s infamous “kill the gays” bill, which he described as an attempt to “uphold moral conduct.” It’s worth remembering that Perkins ran a 1996 campaign for Louisiana Senate candidate Woody Jenkins that paid $82,600 to David Duke for the Klan leader’s mailing list; the campaign was fined by the FEC for trying to cover it up.

3. David Barton.

Texas Republican activist and disgraced Christian-nation “historian” Barton has had a tough year, but Tampa has been good to him. He was perhaps the most vocal member of the platform committee, and was a featured speaker at Sunday’s pre-convention “prayer rally.” During the platform committee’s final deliberations, Barton couldn’t seem to hear his own voice often enough. He was the know-it-all nitpicker, piping up with various language changes, such as deleting a reference to the family as the “school of democracy” because families are not democracies. He thought it was too passive to call Obamacare an “erosion of” the Constitution and thought it should be changed to an “attack on” the founding document. He called for stronger anti-public education language and asserted that large school districts employ one administrator for every teacher. He backed anti-abortion language, tossing out the claim that 127 medical studies over five decades say that abortion hurts women.

Progressives have been documenting Barton’s lies for years, but more recently conservative evangelical scholars have also been hammering his claims about American history. The critical chorus got so loud that Christian publishing powerhouse Thomas Nelson pulled Barton’s most recent book – which, ironically, purports to correct “lies” about Thomas Jefferson – from the shelves. Of course, Barton has had plenty of practice at this sort of thing, from producing bogus documentaries designed to turn African Americans against the Democratic Party to pushing his religious and political ideology into Texas textbooks. Barton’s right-wing friends like Glenn Beck have rallied around him. And nothing seems to tarnish Barton with the GOP allies for whom he has proven politically useful over the years.

4. Kris Kobach.

Kris Kobach wants to be your president one day; until now, he has gotten as far as Kansas Secretary of State. He may be best known as the brains behind Arizona’s “show me your papers” law, and he successfully pushed for anti-immigrant language in the platform, including a call for the federal government to deny funds to universities that allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition – a plank that puts Kobach and the platform at odds with Kansas law. Immigration is not Kobach’s only issue. He is an energizing force behind the Republican Party’s massive push for voter suppression laws around the country, and he led the effort to get language inserted into the platform calling on states to pass laws requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.

He also pushed language aimed at the supposed threat to the Constitution and laws of the US from “Sharia law”; getting this language into the platform puts the GOP in the position of endorsing a ludicrous far-right conspiracy theory. Kobach hopes that will give activists a tool for pressuring more states to pass their own anti-Sharia laws. In the platform committee, he backed Perkins’ efforts to maintain the strongest language against marriage equality. Even an amendment to the marriage section saying that everyone should be treated “equally under the law” as long as they are not hurting anyone else, was shot down by Kobach. Kobach also claims he won support for a provision to oppose any effort to limit how many bullets can go into a gun’s magazine.

5. James Bopp.

James Bopp is a Republican lawyer and delegate from Indiana whose client list is a who’s-who of right-wing organizations, including National Right to Life and the National Organization for Marriage, which he has represented in its efforts to keep political donors secret. As legal advisor to Citizens United, Bopp has led legal attacks on campaign finance laws and played a huge role in the issue of unlimited right-wing cash flooding our elections. Bopp chaired this year’s platform subcommittee on “restoring constitutional government,” which helps explain its strong anti-campaign finance reform language.

Bopp is also an annoyingly petty partisan, having introduced a resolution in the Republican National Committee in 2009 urging the Democratic Party to change its name to the “Democrat Socialist Party.” In this year’s platform committee, Bopp successfully pushed for the removal of language suggesting that residents of the District of Columbia might deserve some representation in Congress short of statehood. His sneering comments, and his gloating fist-pump when the committee approved his resolution, have not won him any friends among DC residents – not that he cares. He also spoke out against a young delegate’s proposal that the party recognize civil unions, which Bopp denounced as “counterfeit marriage.” In spite of all these efforts, Bopp has been at the forefront of Romney campaign platform spin, arguing in the media that the platform language on abortion is not really a “no-exceptions” ban, in spite of its call for a Human Life Amendment and laws giving 14th Amendment protections to the “unborn.”

6. Dick Armey.

Former Republican insider Dick Armey now runs FreedomWorks, the Koch-backed, corporate-funded, Murdoch-promoted Tea Party astroturfing group – or, in its words, a “grassroots service center.” Armey has been a major force behind this year’s victories of Tea Party Senate challengers like Ted Cruz in Texas and Richard Mourdock in Indiana, both of whom knocked off “establishment” candidates. FreedomWorks also backed Rand Paul in Kentucky and Mike Lee in Utah in 2010. As Adele Stan has reported, FreedomWorks’ goal is to build a cadre of far-right senators to create a “power center around Jim DeMint,” the Senate’s reigning Tea Party-Religious Right hero.

To put Armey’s stamp on the platform, FreedomWorks created a “Freedom Platform” project, which enlisted Tea Party leaders to come up with proposed platform planks and encouraged activists to vote for them online. Then FreedomWorks pushed the party to include these planks in the official platform:
  • Repeal Obamacare; pursue patient-centered care
  • Stop the tax hikes
  • Reverse Obama’s spending increases
  • Scrap the tax code; replace with a flat tax
  • Pass a balanced budget amendment
  • Reject cap and trade
  • Rein in EPA
  • Unleash America’s vast energy potential
  • Eliminate the Department of Education
  • Reduce the bloated federal workforce
  • Curtail excessive federal regulation
  • Audit the fed
An Ohio Tea Party Group, Ohio Liberty Coalition, celebrated that 10 of 12 made it to the draft – everything but the flat tax and eliminating the Department of Defense. But FreedomWorks gave itself a more generous score, arguing for an 11.5 out of 12. FreedomWorks vice president Dean Clancy said the platform’s call for a “flatter” tax “opens the door to a flat tax” and said they considered the education section of the platform a “partial victory” because it includes “a very strong endorsement of school choice, including vouchers.”

Honorable mention: Mitt Romney.

This is his year, his party and his platform. The entire Republican primary was essentially an exercise in Romney moving to the right to try to overcome resistance to his nomination from activists who distrusted his ideological authenticity. The last thing the Romney campaign wanted was a fight with the base, like the one that happened in San Diego in 1996, when Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition delighted in publicly humiliating nominee Robert Dole over his suggestion that the GOP might temper its anti-abortion stance. Romney signaled his intention to avoid a similar conflict when he named Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell to chair the platform committee.

Keeping Everybody Happy

The new GOP platform reflects Romney’s desire to placate every aspect of the party’s base. It also demonstrates both the continuing power of the Religious Right within the GOP, as well as ongoing efforts to erase any distinctions between social conservatives and anti-government zealots, as demonstrated by Ralph Reed welcoming Grover Norquist to his Faith and Freedom coalition leadership luncheon on Sunday.

Peter Montgomery is a senior fellow at People For the American Way Foundation.

Monday, August 27, 2012

Teaching People to Hate Their Own Govt. Is at the Core of the Project to Destroy the Middle Class




TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT


How would you teach the middle class to hate their own government using a strategy that takes into consideration the political climate of the United States of thirty years ago?

The following is an excerpt from Dennis Marker's new book 15 Steps to Corporate Feudalism, published this year. In the text  below, Marker shares one of the steps he sees as central to the destruction of the middle class since Ronald Reagan took over. 

Your goal for this step is to figure out how to teach the middle class to hate their own government using a strategy that takes into consideration the political climate of the United States of thirty years ago.

Teaching the middle class to hate their government was an essential part of the plan to implement Corporate Feudalism. A middle class cannot exist without a strong government. This is because only a government has the power to stand up to the giant corporations of today’s world, or the powerful individuals and private armies of earlier times. It is the government that enforces the laws to protect the middle class from those who would like to become their economic rulers. That is why prior to the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the middle class all economies were run according to some version of the feudal system. If you want to put an end to the middle class and replace it with a feudal republic, you would need to change people’s perception of their government.

Obviously a government does not have to be on the side of its people, as can be seen by the existence of countless dictatorships and oligarchies throughout the world. Even the corporatocracy that currently exists in the United States falls far short of being on the side of its middle class. But US history shows that a government committed to serving its citizens can, in fact, help create and maintain a healthy middle class even in the face of powerful corporations whose only interest is maximizing their own power and profits.

It is like the story in old westerns of a big bad landowner who takes what he wants when he wants it, ruthlessly terrorizing a town without a strong sheriff. Any individual who tries to stop the landowner is beaten into submission or killed. The situation continues until the town finds a strong enough sheriff to regain control over the landowner and his gang. This is the Old West version of the feudal system. In westerns, the feudal lord comes first and the sheriff comes later. But in the United States of thirty years ago, the government was the strong sheriff keeping the late-twentieth-century feudal lords from taking what they wanted. As long as the government was supported by its citizens—particularly its middle class—no one could ride into town and steal what belonged to the people. But if the government were weakened or destroyed, a different situation would arise. The intent of the plan for Corporate Feudalism was to convince the middle class to fire their sheriff. And that’s just what happened.

Thirty years ago at the onset of the Reagan Revolution, the middle class basically appreciated and respected their government and believed that living in the United States was good for the middle class. They took their status for granted. The connection between what was good about the United States and its government was clear to the American public. For the most part, people believed the government was on their side and largely responsible for the high standard of living they enjoyed. Their government built the roads that made transportation easy. Their government made the laws and regulations that kept US workers safe at their jobs. Their government ensured that their food was safe. The labor strife that had empowered the middle class was now decades old, and the Vietnam War had ended, although not well. In many ways the United States of thirty years ago was a happy place, and most people understood their government’s role in keeping it that way. While there were problems, including the energy crisis, they seemed manageable. Not everyone was happy with everything the government did, of course, but there was general agreement that the US government was the best government anywhere.

Then the US government found itself in the crosshairs of the brand-new Reagan Revolution with no way to understand why it was under attack and no way to defend itself. For thirty years, it took blow after blow. Now, while still standing, that government is very different from what it was when Reagan took office. It is much weaker, no longer able to offer the protections or provide the services the middle class took for granted thirty years ago—the same kinds of services that many European democracies have continued to provide for their citizens during the period of US economic and social decline. And in its weakened state the US government has lost the support of the very citizens who depended on it the most, the middle class.

How did this happen? When Ronald Reagan got to Washington, he set out to convince the middle class that their government was their enemy, using his considerable powers of persuasion. The basic message of Reagan and the conservatives was that everyone would be better off if the federal government just disappeared. They were smart enough not to say this directly, however. Instead, they just landed one body blow after another without openly expressing their desire to destroy the government.

For example, Reagan attacked government workers, contending they were lazy, they wasted taxpayer money, and they involved themselves in issues they knew nothing about, like regulating large businesses and corporations. Within the first few years of Reagan’s election, the morale of the federal workforce plummeted as these employees saw their image shift from being considered public servants trying to make life in the United States better for everyone to being seen as lazy, despised bureaucrats wasting taxpayer money. Far from being a place where committed public servants worked to help the public, Washington, DC, became known as the place where crooks, thieves, and lazy workers stole taxpayer money for foolish purposes or their own personal benefit.

While federal workers had unions to protect their jobs, they did not have high-priced lobbyists and media consultants to safeguard their image. The unions representing federal workers came under the same harsh attack as the workers themselves, but the attacks went largely unanswered. The nation’s first movie star president had intentionally created this negative image of government workers, and he was convincing.

Following Reagan, other conservatives continued to lead the charge against the government, often using the same language the Reagan administration had employed. Few found language more effective than the Reagan one-liner, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” but they didn’t need to. The leap from John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” to Reagan’s cynical and supposedly frightening “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” had been successfully made.

In addition to waging a full-scale campaign against the government and its employees, the Reagan administration also implemented another practice that was equally destructive to the image of government—filling government positions with people who hated government, a practice that continues to this day. For those seeking to change the United States from a middle-class democracy to a corporate feudal republic, there are three major advantages to this practice. First, you give government jobs to your conservative friends and cronies. Second, you keep dedicated public servants who want to see government succeed out of government. Third, and most importantly, you have a cadre of conservative ideologues working inside the government to sabotage and destroy the government at every turn.

The advantages for conservatives of sabotaging and destroying the government are almost limitless. Looking at a few examples from George W. Bush’s administration shows why. Thirty years ago the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), a government agency committed to protecting the public by monitoring the safety of toys and other products, made a positive difference in people’s lives. However, during George W. Bush’s administration conservatives who filled many of the civil service positions and all of the politically appointed slots did not believe the government should be in the business of helping to protect the public, and they did everything in their power to avoid carrying out their responsibilities. When Congress tried to give the CPSC more money to do a better job of regulating products imported from China, for example, the Bush-appointed agency head refused. She said they had plenty of money to do their job, although in reality they weren’t doing their job at all. Then reports started coming in about unsafe toys originating in China. People were outraged, as they should have been, and blamed the government. By failing to do their jobs, the conservatives were encouraging people to give up on their own government, which was exactly what conservatives wanted.

Thirty years ago, in an effort to make their point, conservatives often exaggerated the examples of government corruption and waste, but during George W. Bush’s administration scandals involving everything from toys to military contracting became the norm. And who were the perpetrators of most of these crimes against the United States and its taxpayers? They were government-hating conservatives working inside the government, placed there for this very reason. Each time one of these conservatives was caught in another scandal, the American public’s view of government deteriorated a little more. If you believe in a government that helps its citizens, this seems bad. But if you believe that the best government is no government this seems great, so the people who wanted to establish Corporate Feudalism couldn’t have been happier.

That was the plan used by Corporate Feudalists to convince millions of middle-class people to hate their own government. Did you think of a more effective way to accomplish this goal? Or do you believe the plan that was used was the most effective one available?

Dennis Marker was twenty one when he embarked on his career in Washington, DC. While there he worked for the US Congress, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), various political campaigns, and Jim Wallis at Sojourners magazine. He is the author of 15 Steps to Corporate Feudalism (2012).

Sunday, August 12, 2012

GREED, RACISM AND APATHY - The new axis of evil



August 11, 2012 at 19:16:51

GREED, RACISM AND APATHY - The new axis of evil




I almost didn't write this. I knew that for informed, thinking people, most of what I want to say is known. However I considered that if I can motivate one person to talk to a relative or a friend who is ignorant of the facts, maybe send the link to this article, or to take action of any sort to help save the tattered remnants of our democracy, it is an effort worth making. 
 

 
Right now it may already be too late to save our democracy. 

The powerful people who pull the strings of government believe only they should decide our fate and they manipulate the ignorant, xenophobic, racist, paranoid elements of our society to act as their brownshirt foot soldiers (aka the Tea party) to push their agenda forward. They simply use the fear of un-American, brown, black, un-christian, gay "others" to supply simple targets for their hate. The fear mongers like Limbaugh and the propaganda arm of the GOP (fox news) dish up the easy lies and supply the "facts" the faithful love to hear. Much easier than actual fact checking and logic. This is how they get so many middle class and lower class whites to work against their own self interests. It would seem that anyone with a modicum of intellectual curiosity would HAVE to notice facts such as, over the past few decades the wealth gap has grown by incredible leaps and bounds, until now the top 20% control almost 90% of our wealth and it seems they would have serious reservations about supporting the obviously plutocratic agenda of the 1% and their foot soldiers, the GOP.

I mean, come on! the GOP! The same guy's who want to take away social security from your mom and dad, cut help for veterans, take away women,s rights, cut help for the poor, allow health insurance companies to continue screwing americans and drop them when they get sick...all so they can give their wealthy corporate masters more tax cuts! What sane working class person would even consider voting for these shills for the 1%?

Consider how willfully ignorant it is to ignore the fact that millions of children in america are hungry and illiterate. That millions of seniors and veterans are homeless and jobless and yet, incredibly, working class Tea party types choose to support Mitt Romney as he builds a car elevator in his latest mansion. They willingly buy the tired old lie that you can't raise taxes on the "job creators"" which is doubly hypocritical since Romney's history of vulture capitalism has cost so many american jobs and history has proved that the old "trickle down" approach has NEVER worked for anyone but the wealthy.

Lloyd Blankfein CEO and Chairman of Goldman Sachs may have said it best.

"After all we've been through in recent years, there's no greater privilege than watching it (the wealth gap) grow bigger and bigger each day. There may be a few naysayers who worry that if it gets any wider, the whole thing will collapse upon itself and take millions of people down with it, but I for one am willing to take that chance." Added Blankfein, "Besides, something tells me I'd probably make it out okay." 

Yeah! There's that "every man for himself" philosophy that republicans love so much.

Of course it is also important to understand that are also some in the democratic party who cater to special interests and sometimes don't have the courage to remember it is the people, not the banks or other special interests that they serve... and they need to be held accountable.

All this is nothing new. History is simply repeating itself. It's just the incredibly rapid pace which wealth transfer has taken place over the last 30 years that is so alarming. Remember the old saw, "those who don't learn from the past"? The only change is that now now the last line would be "are doomed to get screwed"!

However it is the apathetic americans that simply choose to ignore politics and that don't bother to vote or get involved in politics who may just seal the fate of our democracy. How many relatives or friends do you know that can tell you which Kardashian is involved with what pro ballplayer, but don't know what the 'citizens united' decision is? Or what it is doing to american politics. Of course they usually have an easy excuse like "they are all crooks" or "nothing I do will make any difference". Make no mistake, these are the people that MUST be reached. 

Over the past few decades the GOP (aka the 1%) has succeeded in loading our federal courts (including SCOTUS) with right wing ideologues in order to facilitate advancing their plutocratic agenda. You have only to do a bit of casual research to uncover proof like the "Citibank plutonomy memo" to find the truth. In this memo and other documents, it is made clear the main obstruction to the complete control they seek, is the "one person one vote' obstruction" which of course they are attempting to correct with their voter suppression moves" their rationale is the absurd claim it is an attempt to control (non existent) voter fraud.

If you doubt the extent of control the 1% now have over our government, consider this. Even president Obama, who I believe to be a decent, honest man, was afraid to stand against the banks. He left pretty much the same bunch of greedy crooks in charge that caused our financial meltdown under Bush. Now, when he finally tries to put a few tepid regulations in place to keep the wild west, greed is good derivative type games that crashed the economy from happening again... hundreds of millions are poured into republican coffers to beat him down. "citizens united" rears it's ugly head again.

I'm sorry but the fact that ANYONE is taking the collection of misfits, liars and racists that passes for the "new" GOP seriously, is mind numbing. I think republican David Brooks may have summed it up nicely when he said "The republican party may no longer be a normal party. It has become a clearing house for religious fanatics, Ayn Rand groupie weirdos and angry racists, driven literally mad by seeing a black man in the white house".

Consider that president Obama cooperated with the Bush plan to save the U.S. banking system (which we are told worked). He has slowly turned around the economy that the Bush and GOP led deregulation almost destroyed. This in spite of the lunatic opposition he has faced from the Tea party led republicans, including a record number of filibusters to block every attempt at recovery.  Oh btw, the president also killed public enemy #1 (which the macho flag waving conservatives couldn't do). Gave millions of americans tax breaks. Provided health coverage to millions of vulnerable americans. Saved the american auto industry and millions of jobs (when Romney wanted to let them fail) and restored our reputation around the world. Yet Romney and the republicans simply spew dishonest claims that he has failed as president and we need to go back to the trickle down policies that caused the crash in the first place. 

Oh yeah, the "fact" is our shattered economy is slowly but surely recovering, no matter what lies the republican plutocrats tell you.

When some unstable imbecile like Bachman, Rand Paul, Allen West or any of the bizarre collection of right wing liars and hypocrites accuse the president of a host of obviously untrue, vile accusations (which are immediately spread around the fox news echo chamber as fact), and begin their angry completely untrue ranting, too many in the mainstream media who pass themselves off as journalists, meekly pander to them and give power to their lies. They lack the guts to simply call a lie a lie! I mean why in hell did the mainstream media never have the guts to point out the painfully obvious fact that the field of republicans that ran for president was the most ignorant, unqualified, dishonest collection of misfits (with the exception of John Huntsman and Buddy Romer who the Teapublicans rejected) in the history of the United States? 

For the thinking people who are paying attention and have the honesty to be open to facts, those facts will inexorably lead them away from the greed, blatant cynicism and hypocrisy of the republican party. How can you vote for someone like Romney who has reversed every position and is willing to say anything to pander to the lowest elements of the far right? 

In the past few weeks the winner of the GOP presidential luny lottery, Mitt Romney has dishonestly edited the presidents words and even his own appearance before the NAACP to create ads that are in essence LIES! Even as I write this, I hear of the latest lie Romney has begun pushing. Now he is claiming that president Obama is going to remove any incentive for the unemployed to work! He claims the president just wants the lazy welfare types (racist dog whistle) to get checks without ever having to work! (see below) This is of course completely fabricated B.S. 

click here=ed&liteYet

Make no mistake, all the attempts by the cowardly elements of mainstream media to create a false equivalency are absurd. Romney creates obvious lies and makes things up whole cloth continually. Yet when an ad claiming Romney's company, "Bain' shipped american jobs offshore, Romney dishonestly claims those things happened while he was running the Olympic games. Of course he was still CEO and owner of the company. Still, he denies he had any control over that company. In fact, there is video of him saying that things like blind trusts are a "smoke screens" and 'common sense tells us that a CEO still calls the shots in a company he owns'. But in spite of facts, Romney whines he did not know anything and was out of the loop, and hypocritically claims president Obama is lying. Then predictably, we hear "they both do it!" From much of the mainstream media.

The tepid response of the Sunday morning political pundits when questioning conservatives about these Romney lies is usually something like "Democrats say you have quoted the president out of context", because they (the newscasters) lack the guts to simply point out the obvious truth! Then these cowardly talking heads meekly give the bellicose republicans a pass, allow them to double down on their lies and move on to a more comfortable subject. Thank god for the lone voice in the darkness of mainstream media, MSNBC.

Oh! btw"someone please tell the president to keep the predicate close to the subject, this will at least make it more obvious when he is quoted out of context. Also if you have his ear, PLEASE tell him to run the exact ad the conservatives are now running where they say- "he promised to fix the economy and create jobs"and what has he done?"... At this point cut in with the simple truth! HAD EVERY ATTEMPT TO HELP AMERICA RECOVER BLOCKED BY REPUBLICANS!  

Look, it's going to be a tough road, what with citizens united allowing a small group of billionaires (american and foreign) to spend unlimited amounts to buy elections. However it is absolutely imperative that we the people stand against this axis of evil. 

Please share this and all like messages with any uninvolved, ignorant friends and relatives. We must try to educate them to the facts because it really is nothing less than a battle for american democracy. If we lose, the apathetic bystanders who couldn't be bothered to participate in supporting our country by voting, will be just as guilty of our destruction as the greedy 1% and the ignorant brownshirt racists.  

Love learning. Hate stupidity and intolerance. First let me say that I am not a professional writer, although I have written a couple of screenplays and even sold one some years ago. I am however a professional actor and a member of the screen (more...)
 
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

GOP Voter Fraud Hucksters Latest Lie: Felons Made Franken U.S. Senator




A new book by discredited partisans is meant to rile GOP voter vigilantes.

Right-wingers are in a tizzy over excerpts from a new book by two of the GOP’s leading voter-fraud hucksters alleging that Minnesota’s Democratic Senator Al Franken would not have won a statewide recount in 2009 were it not for ex-felons voting illegally.

They are jumping to the false conclusion that illegal felon voting in November 2008 not only tipped a recount in which Franken won by 312 votes—out of 2.4 million cast between the two men—but that tougher state voter ID laws would have changed the result. Both claims are wrong.

“And that’s just the question of voting by felons,”  wrote the Washington Examiner’s report by Byron York, chief political correspondent. “Minnesota Majority also found all sorts of other irregularities that cast further doubt on the Senate results.”

The problem with this assertion—from a new book by The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund and George W. Bush Justice Department attorney Hans von Spakovsky—is that it is not just factually wrong, according to Minnesota Supreme Court records, the Minnesota prosecutor who investigated most of the cases, and some of the country’s top election scholars, but it is intended to rile a segment of the Right that thinks it is patriotic to demonize voting by non-whites and disrupt voting for everyone else.

“They are talking in code to their base,” said Rutgers University’s Lori Minnite, co-author of Keeping Down The Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters. “My guess is that von Spakovsky and Fund know exactly what they are doing.”

“There is no basis in fact, whatsoever, in these inaccuracies propagated by the Minnesota Majority here, none,” Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said Wednesday. “After the most closely scrutinized election in Minnesota history in 2008, there were zero cases of fraud. Even the Republicans lawyers acknowledged that there was no systematic effort to defraud the election, none.”
“In Hennepin County, 650,000 people voted,” he continued. “The Minnesota Majority presented us with 1,500 cases that they felt there were problems with voting. Our own election bureau gave us 100. At the end of the day, we charged 38 cases. And all but one of them are felons voting who were still under the penalty [of not legally applying to regain individual voting rights]. There was no fraud.”

In many cases, former felons are not aware that they have to go through a legal process to regain their voting rights, unlike getting a driver’s license.
“How many of the former felons were registered to vote but never voted,” said Kathy Bonnifield, executive director of Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota, which issued its report on scapegoating felons in November 2010—five months after the rightwingers first raised the spectre of illegal felon voting. “There is a lot of devil in those details.”

The GOP’s Voter Fraud Propaganda War

We must first consider the Right’s devilish messengers and then their dubious details.
John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky are ideologues whose assertions about widespread fraudulent voting have not just been debunked by scholars, but by George W. Bush’s Justice Department itself—where in 2006, von Spakovsky, a lawyer, led the firing  of seven U.S. attorneys for not zealously pursuing voter fraud.

The scandalous firings were hardly a federal law enforcement triumph; the full force of the DOJ could only find three-dozen cases in a country where presidential elections see upwards of 130 million voters. (Von Spakovsky was then appointed by Bush to the Federal Election Commission). Between 2002 and 2005 federal prosecutors under von Spakovsky only brought 38 cases of voter fraud nationwide, winning 24 convictions.

Fund, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and conservative websites, authored a 2004 book about the threat of sloppy election administration and especially voter fraud—which he claims are about people voting illegally or impersonating others at the polls. There is no doubt that elections are complicated and rife with human error, but Fund’s sophistry is to cite isolated problems as indicative of a national crisis, slickly ignoring any sense of scale and pushing ‘solutions’ that help the GOP by targeting perceived Democratic voting blocks.

Von Spakovsky’s vigilantism and Fund’s paranoia are vividly displayed in the contention that Al Franken would not be a sitting U.S. Senator today were it not for illegal voting by former felons that had  illegally cast a ballot in November 2008. It is also noteworthy that the source of this conclusion, according to York’s Examiner report, happens to be the Minnesota Majority, whose “method” of identifying felon voters was to compare voter lists with the most rudimentary information in government databases—a methodology that has been trashed by one of the nation’s leading election statistical scholars, Michael McDonald of George Mason University.

“There are solid reasons to suspect that Minnesota Majority has overstated the number of illegal votes,” McDonald writes, asking, “Why is it always the Democratic areas that are investigated?” Going further, he notes that this crew of voting vigilantes does not care about publicly smearing innocent people who were wrongly identified as felons. “I find it distasteful to publicize the names of people in the Minnesota Majority report whose charges were dismissed, perhaps because they were flagged due to the bad luck of having the same name and birth year as a felon.”

“The numbers are a complete lie,” Freeman’s spokesman said before the Hennepin County Attorney came on the phone. “They keep going on television and repeating this lie, even though we debunked this with the work we had to do.”

Their conclusions are consistent with research done by Bonnifield’s group, Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota, following the 2008 senatorial recount. Her November 2010 report found only 26 voter fraud convictions across the state at that time. They were all ex-felons who registered to vote but never voted (32 percent) or who voted (68 percent) before restoring their voting rights. This distinction is very important because it further debunks the GOP’s voter ID case.
Bonnifield sent a questionnaire to every Minnesota county prosecutor and found not one allegation of voter fraud was prosecutable beyond the issues facing the ex-felons—there was no double voting, underage voting, voter impersonation, coercion of  elderly or disabled voters, or non-citizen voting. Instead, 76 percent of the investigations brought no charge.

In other words, York’s assertion, “it’s not just a question of voting by felons,” is bogus. Confusion by ex-felons, one-third of who registered but never voted, is the only issue. Moreover, the numbers cited by York and his sources about the extent of felon voting may be from more elections than just the November 2008 race sparking the recount.


A spokesman for The Minnesota Court Information Office, operated by its Supreme Court, Tuesday said there were 14 voter fraud convictions across the state in 2009, 11 in 2010, and 132 in 2011. The Court records did not say when, or in which election—before 2008, during 2008, or after 2008—the illegal registrations or voting occurred.

In contrast, York arrogantly and erroneously states that 1,099 felons voted illegally in 2008, and that 177 have been convicted, while another 66 are awaiting trial. This 1,099 figure is close to the total number of voter fraud complaints that were submitted and investigated, of which the vast majority were found to be baseless, according to the Hennepin County Attorney, whose office handled the majority of these allegations.

Fund and von Spakovsky contend that county prosecutors chose to ignore the bulk of illegal voting, according to York, because the state’s standards for obtaining convictions are lax. “The accused can get off by claiming not to have known they did anything wrong,” he said, citing their book. “Still, that’s a total of 243 people either convicted of voter fraud or awaiting trial in an election that was decided by 312 votes.”

That is another statement that should make any lawyer cringe—and von Spakovsky, a lawyer, should know better. The issue of criminal intent is a fundamental precept in American justice. It is the rule and not the exception in criminal law that intent must be in evidence to convict someone of violating a law. By glossing over that distinction—a typical Fund move—these provocateurs are seeking to heighten a sense of unfairness among their clan. Ignoring criminal intent has never been a legal standard or even controversial.

Attacking Elections Is Not Patriotic

There are many reasons why the GOP’s voter ID arguments—including this rubbery analysis—are an overreaching solution in search of a barely-existent problem.

In a state where 2.9 million people voted in November 2008, even if there were 243 illegal voters—and that includes people who have not yet been proven guilty—less than one-thousandth of 1 percent of the state’s electorate registered or voted illegally. The GOP’s ‘solution,’ forcing millions of voters to present specific government-issued photo ID to get a ballot, is using a bulldozer to swat a fly.

Moreover, having a photo ID requirement to obtain a ballot would do nothing to end the confusion surrounding ex-felons prematurely registering to vote. They can do that with a driver’s license. If illegal felon voting is in fact a  problem, then the solution lies with telling probation officers to better-inform their charges, not new statewide voting rules.

But the myth of voter fraud refuses to die among the GOP. Minnesota’s Republican-led Legislature passed a voter ID law that was vetoed this spring by its Democratic governor. It subsequently put a state constitutional amendment on voter ID on the November 2012 ballot. Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, has been sued over ballot language, precluding him from commenting on this new attack by right-wingers on the senatorial recount that he oversaw in 2008-2009.

But beyond arguments over voter ID, there is a bigger point. Republicans increasingly have been trying to tilt the rules surrounding all aspects of voting in recent elections—from restricting voter registration drives, to rules validating voter registration applications, to presenting more specific forms of ID to get a ballot, to toughening the rules for counting provisional ballots given to people who lack that ID, to suing afterwards if the vote count is close. All of these tactics are in play in the 2012 presidential election.

Beyond ignoring the facts, the implicit racism in this latest charge may be its most repugnant feature, as many felons are presumed not likely to be white.
The further assumption that felons vote for Democrats and not Republicans should also be disputed. There are a lot of felons in white majority states that vote for Republicans. In Minnite’s book, she cited the 2004 Washington state gubernatorial recount, where the GOP also claimed that felon voting benefitted the winner, Democrat Chris Gregoire.

In that recount litigation, the court found people with felony convictions who had not yet restored their voting rights had voted illegally—because local election officials mailed them ballots. There was no finding of an intent to defraud. In contrast, the court found that the only showing of an intent to fraudulently vote was by four illegal voters who supported the Republican candidate.    

If the Republican Right were confident in its candidates and message, they would trust voters to listen and decide, and abide by the outcome. Instead, they are trying to game the rules and cast doubt on the public’s confidence in the process—including the prospect of recounts in swing states this fall. And they consider these activities patriotic.   


Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

John Galt Is A Crybaby And So Are You, Mr. Right Winger!




John Galt Is A Crybaby And So Are You


by Richard Eskow

Dear Self-Described "Producer":

I received your hate mail this morning. Thank you for emerging from your self-creating illusion long enough to write it. I particularly enjoyed your unstated rhetorical debt to the John Galt character in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, who isn't acknowledged enough nowadays for his historical importance as the most long-winded and incoherent crybaby in literary history.

It's reassuring to know that his tradition lives on.

I still have faith that there can be a productive exchange of ideas between rational libertarians and people on the left, who share a common perspective on certain issues. But a substrain of libertarian and conservative thought is characterized by a large and undeserved measure of self-regard, combined with an excess of self-pity and a lack of clear ideas.

For today's purposes let us stipulate that your email is Exhibit A.

Letter from a Galtian

"I am really curios (sic) to know what motivates the mind of a socialist," you write. "Why do you think its (sic) fair to penalize those of us who produce while rewarding those who do not?"

(Apparently the email software used by producers doesn't have a spell-check function. Fitting, I guess, for people whose fictional hero described scientists and other educated members of society as "parasites of subsidized classrooms.")
Later you ask, "What happens when the government has exhausted the money acquired from the producers? I have a feeling producers will stop producing if the government is just going to take it."

I don't know you personally, and you didn't sign your name. (Until the novel's end, everybody knows Galt's name but he refuses to speak. His legions of anonymous Internet followers like it the other way around.) I have no way of knowing if you've read the book or just imbibed Rand's ideas second-hand.
Either way you're a follower of John Galt, who, in Rand's famous (and entirely implausible) climax, leads a "strike" of job-producing visionaries rebelling against taxes and regulation.

Quitting Time

Atlas Shrugged is so revered in right-wing circles that, as one ex think tanker admitted, people who hadn't read it were described as "virgins." (Without the readership of virgins it would have languished in obscurity.) Rand's acolytes are always threatening to "go Galt" and deprive us of their beautiful minds, but they never really get around to it. Like the old Dan Hicks song says, "How can we miss you if you won't go away?"

Most parasites of the subsidized classroom know that, in Greek mythology, Atlas holds up the world. One Rand character asks another, "What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

Warning to would-be Galts: Shrugging while holding a heavy globe on your neck and shoulders is orthopedically unsound and could lead to severe cervical spine injury. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of physics knows that the easiest way to unload a heavy planet by simply standing up straight.

When was the last time you stood up straight? You, like John Galt, have been benefiting from government services all your life. The upstanding thing to do is to acknowledge that fact, and then man up and pay your fair share. (I assume you're a man by your prose style, your chosen pen name - and by the fact that most of Rand's followers are.)

Instead, you guys are always threatening to "go Galt." Which raises the question: Who's stopping you?

Who is John Galt?

Ayn Rand tries desperately to stack the deck in favor of her petulant, whiny, and selfish character by having him leave the public education system at age twelve. Later he attends the "Patrick Henry University." ("Give me liberty or give me death"? Subtlety was never Rand's strong suit.) Even so, somebody taught him to read and write - and somebody taught them.

After school's out our massively brilliant philosopher/engineer hero (For some reason another character's catchphrase comes to mind: "Wile E. Coyote, super genius") joins a car company and designs the revolutionary motor of the future. And when they collectivize the car company - because, hey, that happens all the time, right? - he stops work on his motor and goes into hiding.

(To anticipate the obvious Galtian riposte: Yes, the government temporarily ran the car companies, saving lots of jobs after your guys broke the economy. These car companies are doing great. The government rescued banks and didn't run them. Those companies are doing badly and costing us jobs.)

So let's recap: John Galt learned to read and write at the government's expense. He survived childhood without dying from some mass epidemic, thanks to government public health efforts. He avoided being poisoned to death by improperly prepared foods - beef, poultry, milk - or killed by defective machinery - in a car, bus, elevator, or train, for starters - because of government regulations.

Then he got a great job with people who, like his friends and allies, enjoyed the same benefits. And when something happened he doesn't like, he cut and ran.

Some hero.

Galt's climactic speech is a rhapsody of self-entitled victimhood, even after Rand goes to great lengths to make him a comic-book superhero.

Producer or Parasite?

Many of today's "producers" are parasites, even more so than when Rand wrote her book. Mitt Romney's form of "Bain Capitalism," which is shared by Wall Street's big banks, is based almost entirely on betting with other people's money, living large when they win and getting rescued by hardworking, taxpaying Americans - the real producers - when they lose.

And when they lose they still live large. They don't produce jobs, they take them away.

Savor these words, however, as another logorrheic Rand proxy lacerates society's parasites. He calls them ...
" ... whining rotters who never rouse themselves to any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay their bills ... who demand that it be the aim of your life to serve them, who demand that your strength be the voiceless, rightless, unpaid, unrewarded slave of their impotence ... they are born to rule by the grace of incompetence .. yours is only to give, theirs only to take ... yours is to produce, but theirs to consume ... you are not to be paid, neither in matter nor in spirit, neither by wealth nor by recognition nor by respect nor by gratitude ..."
Wow! What a great description of Wall Street bankers! Oh, wait ...

Another one of Rand's over-talkative proxies is a physician who says this, after enjoying all the same government-paid benefits that Galt himself skimmed off the system::

"I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago. Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? ... I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent ..."

I guess that means he doesn't take Medicare. Good luck with those HMOs, Doc!

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of ... I Forget the Third

Which gets us to the other point of your note, Mr. Self-Described Producer:
"If healthcare should be a right then where does it stop? Could one not use the same argument that everyone has a right to free housing? A free car? Perhaps free air travel? Who will pay for all this?"

Healthcare is a right because it is essential to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Those are the freedoms on which are country is founded, and they're precisely the freedoms which so many Galtians despise. In Rand's world the pursuit of happiness is restricted to the most brutal, while life and liberty are yours to fight for if you can. And if the profiteers have killed your parents and impoverished your community and you're a six year old trying to survive -- well, tough luck, you worthless rotter.

Randians want to destroy government and turn this country into a brutal, savage, Mad Max landscape of roving economical (and possibly physical) gangs. You know who would get hurt, besides those of us whose work enriches others?
Producers.

When BP despoiled the Gulf of Mexico, a lot of producers were hurt. Fishermen, including those who were hardworking enough to build up a little fleet of boats and hire others, were badly hurt by the greed and lax regulation that led to the disaster. So were hotel owners, restaurant owners, and other real producers.
One of the few real functions your Mr. Galt will permit government to fulfill is "to protect you from criminals." But what if the criminals call themselves "producers"? Crime on Wall Street is real crime, too. And crimes like BP's hurt other producers.

Galt's two other permissible government functions were to protect his intellectual property and save him from foreign invaders. But if he admits that government is good for some things, he's already lost his argument. It's like that nasty old joke about prostitution: Now we're just dickering.

Healthcare: Galtism's Greatest Failure

As for healthcare, let's drop the emotionality and look at the facts:

Healthcare costs in this country are much higher than they are anywhere else in the developing world, because we've followed your philosophy by leaving it in the hands of private enterprise.

As a result, tens of thousands of people die needlessly every year and many more are disabled.

Medicare, that "socialist" system, is immensely popular among Americans of all political orientations - because it works.

It works because we get our money's worth out of it. When we go to your so-called "producers," however, we get private health insurance whose costs rise at three times that of rational systems or the economy as a whole. We get a grotesque, mismanaged system that serves no one but its executives, offering less coverage at greater cost with every passing year. That's why most people who go bankrupt because of healthcare have health insurance.

Thanks to the Acme Insurers and HMOs of America, "health insurance" provides neither "health" nor "insurance." Wile E. Coyote, super-genius ... The day that health insurance executives "go Galt" will be the day that most Americans are dancing in the streets.

Healthcare is a right, unlike cars or airplane trips, because driving and flying are choices but inhabiting a body is not.

If we don't provide this right in a rational way our entire economy will collapse under the expanding burden of our Galtian healthcare system. Death and disease rates will skyrocket, public health will be threatened, and the cost of medical care will leave people with no money left to buy the things real producers create.

Producers of the World, Unite - and Regulate

Who knows? Maybe you are a real producer. Maybe you're like I was in the business world, creating and building services that employ people. I never got wealthy at it, but it was certainly satisfying - and I'd like to see others enjoy that same satisfaction. If they get rich that way, even better. Everybody loves real producers, including the left.

But real producers won't be able to create jobs - not if there are no schools to educate their employees, no regulations to keep them safe, no roads or bridges to carry their products, and no money left after struggling Americans are done paying their health insurance premiums and caring for their elderly grandparents.

Galt claimed that he and his fellow "super-geniuses" were "the motor of the world," but today's "producers" aren't the "motor" of anything, much less the world economy. They're its flat tires, its dead weight, the hitchhiker in its passenger seat who grabs the wheel and crashes the car whenever the driver isn't looking.

"This is the mind on strike," said John Galt. It must be. His arguments lack intellectual coherence. Coherence requires critical thinking and a command at the facts, two valuable social functions that are often performed by "parasites of the subsidized classroom."

Brigitte Bardot once said that the most powerful erogenous zone of all is the mind. That's one place where you guys are still virgins. But it's never too late to change that. A lot of people would be happy to provide you with a list of reading materials that can explain how low taxes and under-regulation destroy people and societies. In fact, you can start with today's newspaper.
PS: If you can read this, thank a parasite.
_______

About author Richard (RJ) Eskow, a consultant and writer, is a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America's Future. This post was produced as part of the Curbing Wall Street project. Richard blogs at:

No Middle Class Health Tax
A Night Light

Website: Eskow and Associates

Monday, August 6, 2012

Infantile Ayn-Randroidism Hits the Big Time: the New Yorker's Terrifying Longread on Paul Ryan




 
Ryan Lizza has written a must-read profile of Paul Ryan for theNew Yorker that will send chills up your spine:

Sitting in his office more than three years ago, Ryan could not have foreseen how successful his crusade to reinvent the Republican Party would be. Nearly every important conservative opinion-maker and think tank has rallied around his policies. Nearly every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted in favor of some version of his budget plan. Earlier this year, the G.O.P. Presidential candidates lavished praise on Ryan and his ideas. “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan,” Mitt Romney said on March 20th, in Chicago. The following week, while campaigning in Wisconsin, he added, “I think it’d be marvellous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan’s budget and adopt it and pass it along to the President.”

To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.
Indeed. In fact, the Veepstakes panty sniffers are all over the factthat Ryan cancelled a big speech this week-end, intimating that he's undergoing some sort of Romney vetting. A heartbeat away?

The whole article is interesting, but this is key:
His father’s death also provoked the kind of existential soul-searching that most kids don’t undertake until college. “I was, like, ‘What is the meaning?’ ” he said. “I just did lots of reading, lots of introspection. I read everything I could get my hands on.” Like many conservatives, he claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand. After reading “Atlas Shrugged,” he told me, “I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to check out this economics thing.’ What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government.” He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he told the group. “The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” To me he was careful to point out that he rejects Rand’s atheism.
What that really says is that Ryan has not intellectually matured since he was a teenager. But we knew that. What follows shows just how powerful and influential this stunted boy-man has become:
[D]espite some desperate appeals by Republican pollsters, Ryan’s plan passed the House of Representatives, 235 to 193. Only four Republicans voted against it. Ryan told me that the class of Republicans elected in 2010 was transformational. “Usually, you get local career politicians who want to be national career politicians,” he said. “They’re more cautious. They’re more risk-averse. They’re more focussed on just reëlection.” He went on, “This crop of people who came up are doctors and dentists and small-business people and roofers and D.A.s. They’re not here for careers—they’re here for causes.”

Whatever benefit the White House had seen in raising Ryan’s profile, his increasing power, and his credibility as the leading authority on conservative fiscal policy, soon made his imprimatur essential for any Republican trying to reach a compromise with Democrats. Ryan helped scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement, Ryan’s detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with President Obama.

Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor’s aides quietly promoted stories about Boehner’s alleged squishiness on issues dear to conservatives, and encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.

“That’s what Cantor and Ryan want,” Jackson told a group of Republican congressmen, according to Robert Draper’s recent book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do.” “They see a world where it’s Mitch McConnell”—as Senate Majority Leader—“Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It’s not about this year. It’s about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being disgraced.”
2016's right around the corner.

Lizza goes on at great length to describe how much money the stimulus and other government programs has helped Ryan's own district and asks Ryan about it. And Ryan shows once again what a whining little adolescent he is whenever he's confronted with the reality of his hideous misanthropic philosophy:
When I pointed out to Ryan that government spending programs were at the heart of his home town’s recovery, he didn’t disagree. But he insisted that he has been misunderstood. “Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature,” he said. “As if we’re some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It’s a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy.” He added, “Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports.”
As Lizza points out:
[I]ndependent assessments make clear that Ryan’s budget plan, in order to achieve its goals, would drastically reduce the parts of the budget that fund exactly the kinds of projects and research now helping Janesville.
Of course it does. He just refuses to admit that he doesn't give a damn about the parasites, moochers and looters.

The article implies that Ryan is playing with fire and that the Republicans are doing their usual hubristic self-immolation by following his lead. We'd better hope that's right because if this infantile extremist ever gets into high office we're all going to need to go Galt in a hurry.
Hullaballoo / By Digby

Posted at August 6, 2012, 10:10am

Paul Ryan's G.O.P. FussBudget


Newyorker Digital



The Political Scene

Fussbudget

How Paul Ryan captured the G.O.P.

by August 6, 2012

“If you’re going to criticize, you should propose,” Ryan says of his budget plan.
One day in March, 2009, two months after the Inauguration of President Obama, Representative Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, sat behind a small table in a cramped meeting space in his Capitol Hill office. Hunched forward in his chair, he rattled off well-rehearsed critiques of the new President’s policies and America’s lurch toward a “European” style of government. Ryan’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all died before their sixtieth birthdays, so Ryan, who is now forty-two, could be forgiven if he seemed like a man in a hurry. Tall and wiry, with a puff of wavy dark hair, he is nearly as well known in Washington for his punishing early-morning workouts as he is for his mastery of the federal budget. Asked to explain his opposition to Obama’s newly released budget, he replied, “I don’t have that much time.”

Ryan won his seat in 1998, at the age of twenty-eight. Like many young conservatives, he is embarrassed by the Bush years. At the time, as a junior member with little clout, Ryan was a reliable Republican vote for policies that were key in causing enormous federal budget deficits: sweeping tax cuts, a costly prescription-drug entitlement for Medicare, two wars, the multibillion-dollar bank-bailout legislation known as TARP. In all, five trillion dollars was added to the national debt. In 2006 and 2008, many of Ryan’s older Republican colleagues were thrown out of office as a result of lobbying scandals and overspending. Ryan told me recently that, as a fiscal conservative, he was “miserable during the last majority” and is determined “to do everything I can to make sure I don’t feel that misery again.”

In 2009, Ryan was striving to reintroduce himself as someone true to his ideological roots and capable of reversing his party’s reputation for fiscal profligacy. A generation of Republican leaders was gone. Ryan had already jumped ahead of more senior colleagues to become the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, and it was his job to pick apart Obama’s tax and spending plans. At the table in his office, Ryan pointed out the gimmicks that Presidents use to hide costs and conceal policy details. He deconstructed Obama’s early health-care proposal and attacked his climate-change plan. Obama’s budget “makes our tax code much less competitive,” he said, as if reading from a script. “It makes it harder for businesses to survive in the global economy, for people to save for their own retirement, and it grows our debt tremendously.” He added, “It just takes the poor trajectory our country’s fiscal state is on and exacerbates it.”

As much as he relished the battle against Obama—“European,” he repeated, with some gusto—his real fight was for the ideological identity of the Republican Party, and with colleagues who were content to simply criticize the White House. “If you’re going to criticize, then you should propose,” he told me. A fault line divided the older and more cautious Republican leaders from the younger, more ideological members. Ryan was, and remains, the leader of the attack-and-propose faction.

“I think you’re obligated to do that,” he said. “People like me who are reform-minded ignore the people who say, ‘Just criticize and don’t do anything and let’s win by default.’ That’s ridiculous.” He said he was “moving ahead without them. They don’t want to produce alternatives? That’s not going to stop me from producing an alternative.”

Ryan’s long-range plan was straightforward: to create a detailed alternative to Obama’s budget and persuade his party to embrace it. He would start in 2009 and 2010 with House Republicans, the most conservative bloc in the Party. Then, in the months before the Presidential primaries, he would focus on the G.O.P. candidates. If the plan worked, by the fall of 2012 Obama’s opponent would be running on Paul Ryan’s ideas, and in 2013 a new Republican President would be signing them into law.

Sitting in his office more than three years ago, Ryan could not have foreseen how successful his crusade to reinvent the Republican Party would be. Nearly every important conservative opinion-maker and think tank has rallied around his policies. Nearly every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted in favor of some version of his budget plan. Earlier this year, the G.O.P. Presidential candidates lavished praise on Ryan and his ideas. “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan,” Mitt Romney said on March 20th, in Chicago. The following week, while campaigning in Wisconsin, he added, “I think it’d be marvellous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan’s budget and adopt it and pass it along to the President.”

To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.
Janesville, Wisconsin, where Ryan was born and still lives, is a riverfront city of sixty-four thousand people in the southeast corner of the state, between Madison and Chicago. Three families, the Ryans, the Fitzgeralds, and the Cullens, sometimes called the Irish Mafia, helped develop the town, especially in the postwar era. The Ryans were major road builders, and today Ryan, Inc., started in 1884 by Paul’s great-grandfather, is a national construction firm. The historic Courthouse section of Janesville is still thick with members of the Ryan clan. At last count, there were eight other Ryan households within a six-block radius of his house, a large Georgian Revival with six bedrooms and eight bathrooms that is on the National Register of Historic Places.
“I grew up on the block I now live on,” Ryan told me recently. We were sitting in his new, more spacious Capitol Hill office, one of the spoils of being in the majority after the 2010 elections. “My aunt and uncle live across the street from me,” he said. “My cousin is next door, my brother is a block away.” Ryan’s line of the family strayed from the construction business, which is now run by his cousin Adam. His grandfather and father became lawyers instead.

Unlike most members of Congress these days, Ryan is relatively accessible to reporters. “The key to understanding me is really simple,” he said. “I am not trying to be anybody other than who I actually am.” Even his ideological foes comment on his friendliness and good nature. After his sophomore year in high school, back in 1986, he worked the grill at McDonald’s. “The manager didn’t think I had the social skills to work the counter,” he said. “And now I’m in Congress!”

But the summer of 1986 brought a life-changing event. One night in August, he came home from work well past midnight, and he slept late the following morning. His mother was in Colorado visiting his sister, and his brother, who had a summer job with the Janesville parks department, had left early. Paul answered a frantic phone call from his father’s secretary. “Your dad’s got clients in here,” she said. “Where is he?” Paul walked into his parents’ bedroom and thought his father was sleeping. “I went to wake him up,” he told me, “and he was dead.”

“It was just a big punch in the gut,” Ryan said. “I concluded I’ve got to either sink or swim in life.” His mother went back to school, in Madison, and studied interior design; his grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, moved into their home, and Ryan helped care for her. “I grew up really fast,” he said.
He took both schoolwork and extracurricular activities more seriously, he told me. In his junior year, he was elected class president, which made him prom king and gave him a seat representing the high school on Janesville’s school board, his first political position. He played soccer and was on the ski team. He joined nearly every school club: Latin Club, History Club, the Letterman’s Club, for varsity athletes, and the International Geographic Society, which was open to students who received an A in geography, and which met monthly to learn about a different country. At the end of his senior year, he was elected Biggest Brown-Noser. (“At least I didn’t have a mullet,” he said.)

His father’s death also provoked the kind of existential soul-searching that most kids don’t undertake until college. “I was, like, ‘What is the meaning?’ ” he said. “I just did lots of reading, lots of introspection. I read everything I could get my hands on.” Like many conservatives, he claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand. After reading “Atlas Shrugged,” he told me, “I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to check out this economics thing.’ What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government.” He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he told the group. “The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” To me he was careful to point out that he rejects Rand’s atheism.

In 1988, Ryan went to Miami University, in Ohio, where he got to know an economics professor named William R. Hart, a fierce and outspoken libertarian in a faculty dominated by liberals. The two quickly discovered their shared fascination with Rand and Hayek. Ryan got his first introduction to movement conservatism when Hart handed him an issue of National Review. “Take this magazine—I think you’ll like it,” he said.

In 1991, Hart recommended Ryan for an internship in the office of Senator Bob Kasten, a Wisconsin Republican. Two years later, Ryan went to work as a speechwriter and policy analyst for Jack Kemp, who led Empower America, an organization then in the vanguard of making policy for supply-side conservatives who were pushing Republicans rightward in their views on taxes and the size of government. “Jack Kemp is what sucked me into public policy, public service, and politics,” Ryan said. “He called it the battle of ideas, and I just really got into it.”

Hart told me, “He thought the world of Jack Kemp. I got the impression that Jack Kemp became something of a second father.”

In 1997, Mark Neumann, the congressman from Ryan’s district in Wisconsin, who was running for the Senate, called Ryan, who was just twenty-seven, and suggested that he run for the House seat. Neumann knew that the popular Ryan name couldn’t hurt. Ryan went back to Wisconsin, worked briefly for the family business as a “marketing consultant”—a bit of résumé padding that gave him his only private-sector experience—and decided to run. One ad showed him walking through a Janesville cemetery among the gravestones of his ancestors. He won the election, becoming the second-youngest member of the House, and he has been reëlected easily ever since.

Ryan’s first significant policy fight came in 2004. As President George W. Bush campaigned for a second term, largely emphasizing counter-terrorism and national-security policies, Ryan laid the groundwork for the Republican agenda should Bush be elected. For the first time, Ryan had the chance to pursue some of the more daring libertarian ideas that had captivated him. As a thirty-four-year-old representative, he set out to privatize Social Security.

For decades, policy wonks on the Republican fringes had talked about turning Social Security, the government safety-net program for retirees, into a system of private investment accounts. The architect of the movement was Peter Ferrara, a former Harvard Law School student, who, calling it “the craziest idea in the world,” sold it, in 1979, to the small-government fundamentalists at the Cato Institute. (Ferrara is now at the Heartland Institute, best known for its denial of climate change.) They evangelized on behalf of the idea for more than two decades, before pushing it into mainstream Republican politics. Bush was the first Republican Presidential nominee to embrace the idea, but it wasn’t a priority in his first term, which was dominated by the response to 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

Ryan and other conservative leaders, among them Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, wanted to be sure that Bush returned to the plan in 2005. Under Ryan’s initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear.

The release of the Social Security proposal was a turning point in Ryan’s career. Bush could have chosen to push a bipartisan idea, such as immigration reform, as the first domestic proposal of his second term. But, during the 2004 campaign, Ryan, with such allies as Kemp and Ferrara, kept up pressure from the right to force the White House to make a decision on Social Security. Many Republicans were still wary. Two weeks after Bush’s Inauguration, Ryan gave a speech at Cato asserting that Social Security was no longer the third rail of American politics. He toured his district with a PowerPoint presentation and invited news crews to document how Republicans could challenge Democrats on a sacrosanct policy issue and live to tell about it.
Conservative editorialists and activists cheered him on. “What Ryan and Sununu have proposed is historic,” Newt Gingrich wrote in an op-ed piece. “They have fashioned a plan that makes the idea of a personal-account option for Social Security not only politically viable but, indeed, politically irresistible.” Jack Kemp lauded his former aide: “It will be proven the most efficacious of all the reforms.” For the first time, Ryan enjoyed a round of worshipful media coverage. “THAT HAIR, THOSE EYES, THAT PLAN,” proclaimed the headline of a long home-state magazine profile in 2005.

But Ryan’s assurances proved to be wildly optimistic. Bush, urged by Karl Rove to keep his distance from Ryan’s plan, released a far more cautious proposal, with smaller accounts and less expensive transition costs. He spent months on a national tour promoting it, as Ryan had in Wisconsin. Democrats savaged the plan. Bush’s poll numbers sank, and the plan was effectively dead by the fall. The following year, the Republicans lost thirty House seats and the Democrats took over Congress. Other factors contributed to Bush’s failures in 2005 and 2006—Hurricane Katrina, escalating violence in Iraq—but his push for a version of the Ryan Social Security plan marked the start of the decline. Bush, in his memoir, writes that he regretted pursuing the issue when he did.

What some might interpret as the failure of an unpopular idea Ryan insisted was mostly a communications problem. “The Administration did a bad job of selling it,” he told me. Bush had campaigned on national-security issues, only to pitch Social Security reform after reëlection. “And . . . thud,” Ryan said. “You’ve got to prepare the country for these things. You can’t just spring it on them after you win.” The lesson: “Don’t let the engineers run the marketing department.”

Although the ranks of House Republicans were thinner after the 2006 elections, Ryan was sent back to Washington and won the top Republican spot on the Budget Committee. Now he had a large staff of economists working for him and access to the resources of the Congressional Budget Office, which could provide detailed analyses of his proposals. Once again, he set about testing the bounds of conservative ideology within the Party. It was his job to draft an alternative to the new Democratic majority’s budget. Even for the smaller, more conservative G.O.P. caucus of 2007, Ryan’s draft was so extreme that forty out of two hundred and two Republicans voted against it.

He returned the following year with something more polished and more ambitious. In May, 2008, working with two other young Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, of California, and Eric Cantor, of Virginia, who had watched the immolation of the congressional wing of their party during the Bush years, Ryan remade his budget into something he called the Roadmap for America’s Future. Rather than just build support inside Congress, he promoted the Roadmap through the rich network of conservative media and think tanks that helped influence Republican members. “I thought fiscal policy was on the wrong path,” he told me.
Ryan had witnessed three periods when conservatism was ascendant: during the Reagan revolution of the nineteen-eighties; after the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress; and after Bush’s election in 2000. Notably, the federal government’s size and responsibilities grew through all three political epochs. Ryan’s Roadmap soon came to define a fourth conservative surge. Unlike the 1994 Contract with America, which in substance was not nearly as ideological as people thought, and unlike Bush’s compassionate conservatism, which was sold as a rejection of anti-government philosophy, the Roadmap was a comprehensive plan to reduce the welfare state and radically curtail the government’s role in protecting citizens from life’s misfortunes.

Ryan recommended ending Medicare, the government health-insurance program for retirees, and replacing it with a system of direct payments to seniors, who could then buy private insurance. (The change would not affect current beneficiaries or the next decade of new ones.) He proposed ending Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor, and replacing it with a lump sum for states to use as they saw fit. Ryan also called for an end to the special tax break given to employers who provide insurance; instead, that money would pay for twenty-five-hundred-dollar credits for uninsured taxpayers to buy their own plans. As for Social Security, Ryan modestly scaled back his original proposal by reducing the amount invested in private accounts, from one-half to one-third of payroll taxes. Ryan’s Roadmap also promised to cut other government spending, though it didn’t specify how. Likewise, it promised to lower income-tax rates and simplify the tax code, but it didn’t detail which popular deductions—mortgage interest? retirement contributions?—it would eliminate.
Conservative intellectuals at National Review and the Heritage Foundation loved the Roadmap, and Ryan became an icon within the insular world of right-wing pundits. In Congress, things were different. In 2008, with midterm and Presidential elections looming, the Roadmap attracted just eight co-sponsors. Only the most astute observers of G.O.P. internal politics noticed what was happening. In a celebratory column about the Ryan plan in the Washington Post, titled “Fiscal Medicine Man,” Robert Novak, the late conservative writer, predicted, “After what is expected to be another bad G.O.P. defeat in the 2008 congressional elections, Ryan, McCarthy, and Cantor could constitute the party’s new House leadership.”

By early 2009, when I first met Ryan in his office, he was caught between the demands of the Republican leaders, who wanted nothing to do with his Roadmap, and his own belief that the Party had to offer a sweeping alternative vision to Obama’s. Ryan soon had an unlikely ally, in Obama himself. Throughout that year, the Administration struggled to defend its ambitious agenda, in part because there was no Republican alternative for the President to attack. Ryan, deferring to the Party leadership, didn’t aggressively push his plan again. But in late January of 2010, a week after the victory of the Republican Scott Brown in the contest for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts—the first election fuelled by the new Tea Party movement—Ryan offered the Roadmap as an alternative to Obama’s budget.

He presented it not as a dry policy plan, with just numbers and actuarial tables, but as a manifesto that drew on the canon of Western political philosophy as interpreted by conservative intellectuals. The document’s introduction referred to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Hayek, Friedman, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Georges-Eugène Sorel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles Murray, and Niall Ferguson. Ryan himself seemed intent on entering the canon. “Only by taking responsibility for oneself, to the greatest extent possible, can one ever be free,” he wrote, “and only a free person can make responsible choices—between right and wrong, saving and spending, giving or taking.”

Obama saw an opening. Invited to speak before the House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore, on January 29th, he seemed to extend an olive branch to Ryan. “I think Paul, for example, the head of the Budget Committee, has looked at the budget and has made a serious proposal,” Obama said. “I’ve read it. I can tell you what’s in it. And there’s some ideas in there that I would agree with, but there’s some ideas that we should have a healthy debate about, because I don’t agree with them.” Afterward, Obama made a point of shaking Ryan’s hand and signing an autograph for his seven-year-old daughter, Liza. There was talk in Washington that the two young, wonky Midwesterners might be able to build a working relationship.
Three days later, the White House started a livelier debate with Ryan. In a press briefing, Peter Orszag, the budget director at the time, dismantled Ryan’s plan, point by point. Ryan’s proposal would turn Medicare “into a voucher program, so that individuals are on their own in the health-care market,” he said. Over time, the program wouldn’t keep pace with rising medical costs, so seniors would have to pay thousands of dollars more a year for health care. The Roadmap would revive Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security and “provide large tax benefits to upper-income households . . . while shifting the burden onto middle- and lower-income households. It is a dramatically different approach in which much more risk is loaded onto individuals.” Ryan, who had always had a good relationship with Orszag, later described the briefing as the moment when “the budget director took that olive branch and hit me in the face with it.”

But the confrontation enhanced Ryan’s credibility among conservatives. He became the face of the opposition, someone who could attack the President’s policies with facts and figures. Indeed, at the retreat, Obama had mischaracterized Ryan’s Medicare plan, and Ryan politely corrected him. The two men sparred again the next month, at a summit at Blair House, over the President’s health-care plan. The details of Ryan’s proposals and his critiques of Obama’s mattered less than the fact that he was taking on the President. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders started to feel pressure to take a position on the Ryan budget.

In July, Boehner distanced himself from the plan. But Ryan’s outside-in strategy, of building support among conservatives who would pressure Republican leaders to embrace his ideas, started to pay off. An editorial in the Weekly Standard stated that “Republicans should embrace Ryan’s Road Map.” Dick Armey, the former congressional leader, who had become a Tea Party organizer, demanded that Republicans have the “courage” to back Ryan’s plan. Boehner’s position insured that most Republican candidates didn’t listen to Armey’s advice, and in 2010 they campaigned against Obama’s alleged cuts to Medicare rather than for Ryan’s plan to end the program.

Still, after the election, with the Republican Party racing rightward, Ryan provided an intellectual blueprint: there were eighty-seven Republican freshmen who wanted to starve the government but had no clear idea how to do so. In December, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Sarah Palin endorsed the Roadmap, and every potential Republican Presidential candidate knew that he or she, too, would have to take a position on it. In January, 2011, Ryan was chosen to give the official Republican response to the President’s State of the Union speech. “We hold to a couple of simple convictions,” he said. “Endless borrowing is not a strategy; spending cuts have to come first.”

During the next four months, Ryan and McCarthy, the third-ranking Republican in the House, convened a series of listening sessions for their colleagues, placing special emphasis on the Republican freshmen. Wielding a PowerPoint presentation that included photographs of chaos in Greece, which was sliding into its debt crisis, the two led the new members of Congress through the perils of the government’s fiscal trajectory, and patiently explained how Ryan’s plan was both the only solution and a political winner. In April, after months of this education campaign, Ryan formally unveiled a third version of the Roadmap, renamed the Path to Prosperity.

After the listening sessions, Ryan had removed some of the most controversial ideas, including the manifesto-like introduction, and even the Social Security privatization plan. The credit for taxpayers to buy health insurance was scrapped as well, but Ryan added a new plank: to repeal Obama’s health-care law and to effectively cut Medicaid by a third. (Under the plan, Medicaid would no longer keep up with rising medical costs.) Ryan conceded that he couldn’t get his colleagues to go along with everything in the old plan. “I had to pass a bill—I had to get two hundred and eighteen people,” he told me. His original Roadmap “was just me, unplugged,” he said. “But when you’re writing a budget you’re representing an entire conference, and so you have to get consensus.”

Conservative opinion-writers again celebrated his bravery. But there was one note of caution. The ornery Charles Krauthammer doubted that Ryan’s ideas could survive a Democratic onslaught in the 2012 campaign. “House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has just released a recklessly bold, 73-page, 10-year budget plan,” he wrote. “At 37 footnotes, it might be the most annotated suicide note in history.”
In mid-April of 2011, in a speech at George Washington University, Obama once again decided to make an example of Ryan. Republicans were finally about to vote on the Path to Prosperity, and the President was eager to offer his opinion. Obama, for nearly the first time in his Presidency, emphasized the ideological divide between the two parties rather than offering bromides about what they shared. The White House invited Ryan to the speech and reserved a V.I.P. seat for him. Obama had personally called Ryan after Republicans won the majority in the House the previous November, and Ryan thought the two might have a rapport. They both liked sports and, because Ryan’s district runs along the Illinois border close to Chicago, knew many of the same people. “He’s a cerebral guy who likes policy, and he’s from my part of the country,” Ryan said. “At the beginning, I did have some hope.” 

Ryan sat in the front row as the President shredded his plan. “I believe it paints a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic,” Obama said. “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.”

Ryan seemed genuinely shocked. During a radio interview later in the day, he complained that Obama had called him “un-American,” and he objected to the charge that he was “pitting children with autism or Down syndrome against millionaires and billionaires” and “ending America as we know it.” Ryan told me, “I was expecting some counteroffer of some kind. What we got was the gauntlet of demagoguery.”

Two days after the speech, despite some desperate appeals by Republican pollsters, Ryan’s plan passed the House of Representatives, 235 to 193. Only four Republicans voted against it. Ryan told me that the class of Republicans elected in 2010 was transformational. “Usually, you get local career politicians who want to be national career politicians,” he said. “They’re more cautious. They’re more risk-averse. They’re more focussed on just reëlection.” He went on, “This crop of people who came up are doctors and dentists and small-business people and roofers and D.A.s. They’re not here for careers—they’re here for causes.”
Whatever benefit the White House had seen in raising Ryan’s profile, his increasing power, and his credibility as the leading authority on conservative fiscal policy, soon made his imprimatur essential for any Republican trying to reach a compromise with Democrats. Ryan helped scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement, Ryan’s detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with President Obama.

Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor’s aides quietly promoted stories about Boehner’s alleged squishiness on issues dear to conservatives, and encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.

“That’s what Cantor and Ryan want,” Jackson told a group of Republican congressmen, according to Robert Draper’s recent book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do.” “They see a world where it’s Mitch McConnell”—as Senate Majority Leader—“Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It’s not about this year. It’s about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being disgraced.”

One afternoon in mid-July, John Beckord, a Ryan supporter and the head of Forward Janesville, a pro-business economic-development group, took me on a tour of Ryan’s home town. As the years went by, the successful small businesses of the old Irish Mafia came to be overshadowed by one employer, General Motors; at its peak, in 1978, the automaker employed seventy-one hundred people and later produced more than a thousand sport-utility vehicles a day. Janesville has often served as a backdrop for Presidents and Presidential candidates. During a campaign stop there in 2008, Obama said, “The promise of Janesville has been the promise of America.” Later that year, the plant announced that it would close, causing the loss of some five thousand jobs in the area. Mitt Romney gave his standard stump speech in Janesville recently, with Ryan at his side. 

Beckord drove along the perimeter of the abandoned plant, which stretched across more than two hundred acres. He pointed out a wide plain of asphalt, now sprouting weeds, that had once served as a parking lot for thousands of cars. Through 2007, Ryan regularly requested government money for special projects back home. Earmarks grew out of control during the Bush years, but most of what Ryan asked for, and got, was defensible: four hundred thousand dollars for a water-treatment plant; three hundred thousand for a technical college where G.M. workers could be retrained; seven hundred and thirty-five thousand for Janesville’s bus system; and $3.3 million for highway projects throughout Wisconsin. In 2008, however, Ryan vowed not to request earmarks anymore; he later helped push through an outright ban. I asked Beckord whether Ryan’s libertarianism ever clashed with the needs of his constituents. He hesitated, then said, finally, “I suppose there could have been a full-court press to just cobble together as much federal money as possible on our behalf to make it irresistible for G.M. to keep this plant open.”

When we got beyond the auto plant, Beckord pointed out some of the promising initiatives in town. “We’re finding a new identity,” he said. Since the plant closed, Janesville, which sits almost at the center of a ring of major cities, including Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Des Moines, and Minneapolis, has partly reinvented itself as a distribution hub for major companies. “They don’t make anything here,” Beckord explained. “But they distribute their products from here.” We passed a John Deere facility where hundreds of lawn tractors and mowers were stacked on pallets. Janesville is a major distribution center for John Deere lawn-care products. Several other national companies, including Grainger, which sells various industrial products, and LeMans, which sells parts for motocross and snowmobiling equipment, use Janesville for the same purpose.
As Janesville increasingly becomes a base for the business of distribution logistics, its single most pressing economic concern is good roads. Beckord pointed toward Interstate 90, which runs southeast a hundred miles to Chicago. “From an economic-vitality and economic-development perspective, transportation infrastructure is huge,” he said. Next year, I-90 around Janesville will begin expansion from four lanes to eight. The project, the top issue for the local business community since the G.M. plant closed, will be financed as part of a billion-dollar federal and state highway project. “Paul has been as helpful as he can be to encourage that development,” Beckord said. “But, as you know, he also has a philosophical disconnect with the idea of earmarks.”

We passed a warehouse-like building under construction where several men in hard hats were at work. Beckord explained that it would soon house the Janesville Innovation Center, providing entrepreneurs with commercial space in which to launch their ideas. The money came from a $1.2-million government grant through the Economic Development Administration, one of Obama’s major stimulus programs.

There was one more success story that Beckord wanted to share. A few years ago, he had a melanoma that was treated with a radioactive isotope; this isotope is administered to fifty-five thousand patients a day but has a half-life of sixty-six hours after manufacture, so it must be delivered quickly. The isotope, known as a medical tracer, is made outside the United States by a complicated process requiring highly enriched uranium from nuclear reactors. The government offered twenty-five-million-dollar matching grants to companies that could devise a way to produce the material domestically, without using enriched uranium. “Two of the four companies that won that competition, incredibly, are going to build plants in our county, and one of them is going to be in Janesville,” Beckord said. In May, the federal government announced that it would contribute more than ten million dollars to the new facility, which could employ some hundred and fifty people.

The current Presidential campaign centers on the debate about the government’s role in the economy. Ryan, by forcing Republicans to embrace his budget plan, has helped shape this debate. Obama, on July 13th, told a crowd in Virginia, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He added, “When we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.” 

To Ryan, Obama’s words were anathema. In a conversation three days later with James Pethokoukis, a conservative blogger for the American Enterprise Institute, he had harsh criticisms for the President. “His comments seem to derive from a naïve vision,” Ryan said, that is based on “an idea that the nucleus of society and the economy is government, not the people.” Obama’s “big-government spending programs fail to restore jobs and growth,” he said, and amount to “a statist attack on free communities.”

When I pointed out to Ryan that government spending programs were at the heart of his home town’s recovery, he didn’t disagree. But he insisted that he has been misunderstood. “Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature,” he said. “As if we’re some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It’s a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy.” He added, “Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports.” But independent assessments make clear that Ryan’s budget plan, in order to achieve its goals, would drastically reduce the parts of the budget that fund exactly the kinds of projects and research now helping Janesville.

As in 2009, Republicans are divided between those who think they can win by pointing out Obama’s failures and those who want to run on a Ryan-like set of ideas. Romney seems to want to be in the first camp, but during the primaries he championed the ideas in Ryan’s budget. Ryan is frequently talked about as a future leader of the House Republicans and even as a long shot to be Romney’s running mate. He surely would take either job, but he seems better suited to continuing what he’s been doing since 2008: remaking the Republican Party in his image. You can’t “run on vague platitudes and generalities,” he told me earlier this month. He was speaking about Bush in 2004 and Obama four years ago. But he clearly believes that the same holds true for Romney in November.

“He’s already endorsed these things,” Ryan said. “I want a full-throated defense for an alternative agenda that fixes the country’s problems. I want to show the country that we have a solution to get us out of the ditch we’re in, and to be proud about it.”

Ryan seemed unconcerned that pushing his policy agenda on Romney might damage the candidate. “I think life is short,” Ryan said at the end of our final conversation. “You’d better take advantage of it while you have it.”
ILLUSTRATION: Jorge Arévalo