Republicans hope putting Ryan on the GOP ticket will help galvanize public support for his austerity budget. But the American people are looking for a very different agenda, as TDS CO-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’

In the recently released American Values Survey, conducted by Penn Schoen Berland for The Atlantic Monthly and the Aspen Institute, the public endorses spending more on education and infrastructure while raising taxes on the wealthy as the best route to economic growth (56 percent) instead of lowering taxes on individuals and businesses while cutting spending on government services and programs (42 percent).
The public’s opposition to cutting even less essential government services to provide such tax cuts was made clear in a mid-July CBS/New York Times poll where 66 percent opposed that approach, compared to just 30 percent who supported it.

It’s highly unlikely that Ryan, Romney or any Republican ideologue is going to transform the public’s deeply-held beliefs about fairness in tax policy and government’s important role in addressing human needs. As Teixeira concludes, “If Conservative politicians’ crusade to cut spending and preserve tax cuts for the wealthy may charge up the conservative base. But the broader public seems distinctly unenthusiastic.”

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Since Mitt Romney named Paul Ryan as his running mate on Saturday, right wing pundits have done their best to frame his pick as a “bold” choice. In fact, it appears to have been a choice born of the dawning realization at Romney’s high command, that his political situation was becoming increasingly desperate.
And the notion that Ryan himself is a “bold visionary” is nothing more than sheer fantasy — unless, of course, your “vision” of the future is the “Gilded Age.”
Before the announcement, conventional wisdom held that Romney would make a safe, boring choice for vice president — somebody like Tim Pawlenty or Rob Portman. The thought was that he would be cautious, both because he is, by nature, a cautious kind of guy — and because he was doing well enough that he didn’t want to make the a rash move that could blow up the way McCain’s decision to enlist Sarah Palin as his running mate exploded four years ago.
But let’s face it, Romney was having a terrible summer. According to Nate Silver’s 538.com — the most sophisticated forecasting model around — Romney’s chance of winning this fall had dropped to under 30%. His Las Vegas odds — and odds on the Intrade political market — weren’t much better.
Romney’s foreign trip was a disaster. As much as anything it demonstrated that he lacks the most important single trait of successful political leaders: empathy. Romney seems constitutionally incapable of putting himself in other people’s shoes. He launched his expedition to Europe and Israel to demonstrate that he was a capable statesman, and looked instead like a bull in a china closet — insulting everyone in sight. Worse yet he looked out of his depth — like a student who was allowed to create his own SAT test and still failed to pass. Or, as former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs put it — he looked like a guy who struck out at T-Ball.
His refusal to release his tax returns has continued to focus attention on Romney’s wealth — and the fact that in the one full year of returns he has opened to public scrutiny, he paid only a 13.9% effective tax rate makes it look like he plays by a different set of rules than ordinary mortals. Matters got worse when the a non-partisan Brookings Institute Study found that his tax “reform” plan would increase the taxes of 95% of Americans, and give him — and millionaires like him — hundreds of thousands of additional tax breaks.
Romney’s history of outsourcing American jobs, his record at Bain Capital, his Swiss Bank Accounts and cash in the Caymans, have all begun to convince persuadable voters that he just isn’t on their side. And it has become apparent that the more voters learn about his record as governor of Massachusetts — 47th out of 50 in job creation — his claims to be an effective job creator were just so much hot air.
And finally there was the indisputable fact that Romney seems incapable of relating to ordinary Americans and their lives (e.g., “corporations are people too,” “Ann drives two Cadillacs,” “I love firing people,” etc.).
That’s not to say that Romney doesn’t still have a lot of chips on his side of the table. The long recovery from the Great Recession — which was, of course, caused by precisely the same policies that Romney would like to revive — presents a headwind for President Obama. And that headwind has been amplified by Republicans in Congress who have intentionally sabotaged the American economy for their own political advantage — doing everything in their power to prevent passage of the infrastructure and jobs programs that independent analysts say would have created at least another million jobs.
And, of course, there is the advantage bestowed by the unprecedented tsunami of money with which multi-millionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson hope to buy the outcome of the election.
In fact, a good case can be made that Romney still has a pretty good chance of beating the odds in November. But the Romney campaign — and its super wealthy right wing supporters — were starting to panic. And the forces that wanted to bet the ranch on a real, radical right-wing take over of American government used that panic to successfully promote their choice of most right wing vice presidential candidate since 1900. They convinced the campaign high command to double down on the view that this election is ultimately about mobilizing their base — and, they argued no one could do that better than Paul Ryan.
Ryan’s choice must have been controversial among Romney’s advisers. Medicare is enormously popular in America — especially among senior citizens who make up a disproportionate percentage of the vote in swing states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Nevada. Ryan is — after all — the leader of the movement that no kidding around, wants to abolish Medicare as we know it. Presumably they believe that they can spend enough to confuse older voters into believing something different. Don’t bet on it.

Read more…

With the selection of Paul Ryan for V.P. The Democratic Strategist is reissuing several posts about his political philosophy. This post by James Vega is from April 25th 2011
Paul Ryan is unusual among politicians because – unlike most — he is actually committed to a specific, explicitly formulated social philosophy – the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are three facts that make the depth of his commitment unmistakably clear:

• Paul Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he cited Rand as his primary inspiration for entering public service. “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 said.
• He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on Rand. “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism,”
• He distributes copies of Rand’s books to his staff and requires them to read them.

So is Ryan really a committed and genuine follower of Rand? Let’s try just a little bit of intellectual honesty here. Just replace the name Ayn Rand with V.I. Lenin and imagine a Democrat trying to get away with doing the things listed above without being labeled a hard-core Leninist fanatic.
OK, so let’s accept that Ryan is a serious, dyed-in-the-wool Ayn Rand-ian. So what? Well, listen to these quotes from Rand about ordinary working people:

“The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains…
…Wealth is …made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools, by the able at the expense of the incompetent, by the ambitious at the expense of the lazy….
“What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”

No, these are not out of context, uncharacteristic remarks and no, they are not referring only to people on welfare. They are the core of an organized philosophy that glorifies the wealth-creating businessman and dismisses the ordinary working stiff as a dumb and lazy parasite whose mediocrity is his own damn fault and who lives off businessmen’s productivity like a blood-sucking leech. It’s the philosophy at very heart of “Atlas Shrugged” the book that made Rand a right-wing hero.
Now here is Ayn Rand on God:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

Ayn Rand on Faith:

…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

Ayn Rand on Christian Compassion:

Now there is one word–a single word–which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand–the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it–and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given. It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it… one just takes it on faith.

Ayn Rand on the Cross:

“It is the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. . . . It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.”

“Mysticism” and “superstition” were two of Ayn Rand’s favorite derogatory terms for religion and her dismissal of Christ for sacrificing himself for his “inferiors” ties together her contempt for both ordinary working people and Christianity at the same time. There are in her works countless statements that literally drip with scorn and loathing for the weak, the helpless, the needy – the people Jesus called “the least of these”. Her “Virtue of Selfishness” described such people as contemptible failures and parasites — inferiors to be despised, not comforted.
Many conservative Christians who take their Christianity seriously do face up to the genuinely creepy and sinister “uber-mensch” (superior man) and “unter-mensch” (inferior man) elements of Rand’s philosophy and reject it categorically.
Here, for example, is Michael Gerson:

Reaction to Rand draws a line in political theory. Some believe with Rand that all government is coercion and theft — the tearing-down of the strong for the benefit of the undeserving. Others believe that government has a limited but noble role in helping the most vulnerable in society — not motivated by egalitarianism, which is destructive, but by compassion, which is human. And some root this duty in God’s particular concern for the vulnerable and undeserving, which eventually includes us all. This is the message of Easter, and it is inconsistent with the gospel of Rand.

But Paul Ryan doesn’t believe this at all – he considers Rand his hero and inspiration – and it’s really vile and contemptible that so many conservatives who claim to be both devout Christians and great defenders of the average American are happily snuggling up under the covers and making goo-goo eyes with a guy whose philosophy should make them gag up their lunch and run to take a shower. Politics may make strange bedfellows, but this slimy and perverse union is particularly grotesque.

“Koch Industries ranks as the Wisconsin Republican’s sixth-largest source of campaign money throughout his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which says the company’s PAC and affiliated individuals have given him a total of $65,500 in donations.”
– from Bob King’s Politico post, “Koch brothers have Paul Ryan’s back”
“He has never held statewide office and has no foreign-policy experience. Both could be liabilities.”
– from NBC News.com’s First Read on “Paul Ryan’s Strengths and Weaknesses”
“Ryan “was voted prom king and the ‘Biggest Brown-Noser’ of his 1988 high school class before leaving for college in Ohio.”
– from Bryan Bakst’s Associated Press profile of Ryan
Wikipedia deleted the “biggest brown-noser” comment from its bio page on Ryan this morning.
— from Dylan Byers’s Politico post, “The Paul Ryan Wikipedia edits begin”
Politifact gave him a “Pants on Fire” animated gif rating for his statement that “President Barack Obama “has doubled the size of government since he took office.”
– from Politfact Wisconsin’s “Paul Ryan’s File”
He may be Mr. Deficit Hawk now. But twas not ever thus: “He was the sponsor in the House of a bill to create new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan’s plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as “irresponsible.”
— from Jonathan Chait’s New York magazine article on “The Legendary Paul Ryan: Mitt Who?”
Further, “There are also holes in Ryan’s budget-hawk armor: He voted for some of the biggest drivers of the deficit/debt — the Bush tax cuts, the Iraq war, and the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, all of which weren’t paid for. Moreover, Ryan voted against the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles recommendations.”
– from NBC News.com’s First Read on “Paul Ryan’s Strengths and Weaknesses”
Worse, “Ryan has been a steady voter for unwise bailouts of big banks, unfunded mandates and unnecessary wars. Few members of Congress have run up such very big tabs while doing so little to figure out how to pay the piper.”
— John Nichols, The Nation
“Ryan is just a “hyper-ambitious political careerist– who has spent his entire adult life as a Congressional aide, think-tank hanger-on and House member,” says Nichols. He “wants to keep on climbing until he’s America’s real life John Galt. He knows he could control a doddering fool of a puffed up CEO type like Romney as easily and thoroughly as Cheney controlled Bush,” adds the Paul Ryan Watch.
– from “Paul Ryan? Seriously?” by The Nation’s John Nichols, via The Paul Ryan Watch
Romney may have just booted Florida.

With the selection of Paul Ryan for V.P. The Democratic Strategist is reissuing several posts about his political philosophy. This post is from April 27th 2912
Ed Kilgore has an insightful and entertaining post up at Political Animal, taking Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to task for his less than credible dismissal of Ayn Rand as his philosophical guru. Riffing on a Ryan interview with National Review’s Robert Costa, Kilgore explains:

So we learn this week from an interview with National Review’s Robert Costa that Paul Ryan laughs off his identification as a big fan of Ayn Rand as an “urban legend,” based on little more than his youthful enjoyment of (and later, philosophical “bantering” about) her “dusty novels.” No, he sternly asserts, he rejects Rand’s “atheist philosophy;” give him St. Thomas Aquinas any old day!
Costa does not report that Ryan specifically denies the actual foundation for the “urban legend” associating him conspicuously with Rand: his remark in 2005, when he was hardly a callow teenager, that Rand inspired his entire career in public service, or his habit of giving copies of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s militant magnum opus, to his congressional interns in 2003.
All of this wouldn’t matter much, except for the fact that Rand is the philosophical godmother of modern GOP obstructionism, the rigid refusal to compromise on legislation to benefit working people or inconvenience the wealthy in any way. Kilgore elaborates:
…The thing about Ayn Rand, as anyone who has actually read her works can attest, is that she offered readers an all-or-nothing proposition. She didn’t entertain, she instructed. This was most evident in Atlas Shrugged, whose centerpiece was an endless didactic “radio broadcast” by her hero John Galt, identifying all human misery with the “mysticism of the mind” (supernatural religion) and the “mysticism of the muscle” (socialism, or more accurately, the rejection of strict laissez-faire capitalism), and with the ethics of altruism both reflected.

As Kilgore quotes from Whitaker Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged, “I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal…”
As for Ryan’s reputation as a top GOP thinker, Kilgore concludes,

It’s possible, I suppose, that Paul Ryan is a secret “Objectivist” who keeps gold dollar sign pins in his underwear drawer. More likely, though, he doesn’t understand Ayn Rand any better than he seems to understand Catholic social teachings. In either event, his reputation as a deep thinker whose brilliance and good will demand respect from everyone across the political spectrum strikes me as entirely undeserved.

It’s not hard to understand why Ryan, like a deer caught in the headlights, would deny Rand’s formative influence on him, since she was not only a heartless reactionary, but also a militantly pro-choice atheist, who accepted Social Security and Medicare (According to “100 voices: an oral history of Ayn Rand”), while sneering at social programs for everyone else. But Ryan’s denials won’t be taken very seriously by anyone familiar with his record.

The following post comes from an e-blast from Chris Bowers of Daily Kos:
…Join with Daily Kos and Democracy for America by signing our petition telling the House Democrats in ultra-safe districts who have stockpiled more than $63 million to start sending some of that money to progressive Democrats in swing districts. Please, click here to sign the petition.
Democrats have a good chance to retake the House of Representatives, with eight polls in the last month showing them either ahead or tied. Still, the current Democratic lead is tenuous because negative ads from Republican Super PACs will only increase as the election approaches.
Fortunately, there is a way to counter this coming onslaught of corporate cash. There are nearly 100 House Democrats in very safe districts who collectively have more than $63 million in their campaign bank accounts. If these Democrats started sending some of that money to campaigns in swing districts, they would provide the financial support needed to send John Boehner and the tea party packing.
We know pushing these Democrats can work, because we’ve done it before. Back in 2006, our grassroots pressure resulted in ultra-safe Democrats sending millions of dollars to battleground districts, thus playing an important role in Democrats retaking the House that year.
We can do it again in 2012, but we need to start now. Please, click here to tell ultra-safe House Democrats to stop hoarding cash and step up their support for progressive Democrats in swing districts.
Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers
Campaign Director, Daily Kos

TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore posts at The Washington Monthly about former President Bill Clinton’s response to the “highly mendacious and deeply divisive new ad on welfare policy” that tries to mislead voters into believing that President Obama is somehow abolishing the central “work” focus of the 1996 welfare reform act. Kilgore quotes from Clinton’s response (via Politico):

…The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment. The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the 1996 act will not be waived.
The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that could have eliminated time limits altogether. We need a bipartisan consensus to continue to help people move from welfare to work even during these hard times, not more misleading campaign ads.

Kilgore adds:

How did the Romney campaign’s response to this rather categorical rejection of the ad’s claims? It just repeated them. I swear, trying to engage these people in any sort of reasoned discourse is like looking into the eyes of a goat: nothing there but the determination to keep on keeping on, truth be damned…The welfare ad is going to be in heavy rotation according to Romney campaign sources, and no number of refutations of its central claims (by Clinton or by “fact-checkers” like PolitiFact, which quickly gave the ad a “Pants on Fire” designation) will stop them.

The Romney campaign and the candidate himself are on track to set an unprecedented record for deliberate distortions — if they haven’t already done so.

TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore has a post up at Washington Monthly’s ‘Political Animal’ about Romney’s chief strategist Stuart Stevens, more specifically what was revealed in Noam Scheiber’s TNR profile of Stevens. Here’s Kilgore:

..Stevens comes across as the rare Republican operative that a progressive might like: literate, funny (or so Scheiber says), and not taking himself or even politics all that seriously. He dislikes life in Washington, as most sane non-natives do, and doesn’t much “get” the right-wing ideology of his party.
But on another level, his very insouciance seems sinister. He wrote a memoir of his experiences in Bush’s 2000 campaign that apparently treats the whole Florida saga like a series of fraternity pranks….

Kilgore references a much-ridiculed Romney ad which was ‘creatively’ edited to make it look like President Obama made a gaffe, when really the President was quoting a McCain adviser. Kilgore quotes Scheiber: “Stevens could hardly believe the blowback–it was an ad, after all, a mere act of propaganda. What was the big deal?,” and adds:

This amorality about politics helps explain why Stevens–who is described as remarkably in synch with the ostensibly very different Mitt Romney–treated the ideological concessions his candidate had to make to secure the GOP nomination as sort of the cost of doing business. Cynicism is hardly a rare trait among campaign consultants, but when yoked to a candidate like Romney who has never taken a single policy position he would not cheerfully abandon the moment it inconvenienced him, Stevens is hardly a reassuring figure to anyone at any spot on the ideological spectrum who takes governing and its consequences seriously….
…I feel about Stevens sort of like I feel about Mitt’s vice presidential choice: if America is about to lurch off into a fateful right-wing direction, I’d sort of like the people leading it to tell me what they want to do and why, and not hide behind inanities, or worse yet, treat the country’s future as a trifle or a plot line in their personal stories. And if Mitt Romney wants to be the hero of that story, I’m afraid Stuart Stevens will be perfectly happy to write it up and then write if off as another cool experience.

All in all, Stevens doesn’t sound like a political strategist who cares much about ethics — or about helping Romney find the ‘common touch’ he seems to lack.

In his latest ‘Public Opinions Snapshot, ‘TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, author of America’s New Swing Region: Changing Politics and Demographics in the Mountain West, shows that Americans still want a significant government role in health care. Teixeira explains:

Conservatives have been arguing strenuously that public uncertainty about the Affordable Care Act is connected to a deep-seated reaction against government involvement in health care. According to them, voters are waking up to the depth of government involvement in the health care system and are rejecting it.
Findings from the recently released American Values Survey conducted by Penn Schoen Berland for The Atlantic Monthly and the Aspen Institute indicate, however, that the public continues to embrace strong government involvement in the health care system. Take the question of whether the government should guarantee health care coverage: With the Affordable Care Act firmly in place, 69 percent of the public still endorses government responsibility for health care coverage, while 31 percent are opposed.

Equally impressive, a majority, not just a plurality, wants more government involvement in health care. As Teixeira says:

…When the public was asked whether the government should exert more influence over America’s health care system to bring down costs and provide health care coverage, 54 percent agreed, compared to 44 percent who endorsed the idea that government involvement should decrease and that the system should be more free-market oriented. So the public actually endorses more government involvement, even with the Affordable Care Act already in place.

All of which helps explain why Republicans have failed to forge a majority coalition to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It also suggests that most Americans are now ready to give the legislation a chance — and are open to strengthening the government’s role in health care reform.

One of Michael Tomasky’s best posts, “Obama Is Winning Because of the Shrinking GOP” provides a lucid overview of the presidential race. With a little luck, the trend he describes could prevail through November.
Tomasky begins with the observation that Romney is “losing to an incumbent who, given the current economic conditions, ought to be pretty easy to take out” and sketches a pretty good snapshot of the current political moment:

The race is close, and of course Romney has a decent shot at winning. But the fact is that by every measure, he’s behind. He’s behind, a little, in national polls. He’s behind by more in the swing states. And behind by still more in the electoral college conjectures, where Nate Silver gives Obama 294 votes. Obama leads–narrowly, but outside the margin of error–in Virginia, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. If he wins those and holds the usual Democratic states–and yes, he’s up in Pennsylvania, where Romney has been sinking fast; only Michigan is really close–he will have won, even with maybe $1.5 billion thrown at him, a not-particularly close election.

Tomasky adds that, given the current economic reality, the divisions over the Affordable Care Act and the midterm elections, Romney should be up by six percent or so. Yet Silver gives Obama a 66 percent chance of winning, nonetheless. “…If that’s still the number after both conventions,” says Tomasky, “it’s pretty close to over.”
It’s not just the ‘likeability’ factor, argues Tomasky. It’s that a critical mass of voters are recognizing the GOP as the party of the aristocracy

Thomas Jefferson argued roughly that it was in the nature of mankind to divide itself, wherever there be free government, into two basic factions: an aristocratic party that wishes to “draw all powers…into the hands of the higher classes,” as he once put it; and a party that opposes that one, representing the broader people. The GOP has, I admit, done a marvelous job of convincing the media and even some liberals that it is the party of the people, because of its hold on the white working-class majority (a segment that is fast dwindling, by the way–electoral demographer Ruy Teixeira reported recently that this bloc will constitute a sizeable 3 percent less of the electorate this year than it did in 2008–the minority vote will overtake the white working-class by 2016 or certainly 2020).

The GOP plays the cultural card exceptionally well, so much so that they are still able to get strong support from the white working class, even though the Republicans offer them nothing in the way of economic security. Tomasky explains that “they must know on some level that the party does not represent them in the least economically. But they accept the deal, and it permits the people who are the real heart and soul of the GOP, the corporate titans and the plutocrats, to call whatever economic shots they wish.”

But their crossover appeal, shall we say, is limited. Throw in their lickspittles on Capitol Hill and in the right-wing media, and their neo-Leninist political tactics, and the picture gets even worse. The lot of them look like a bunch of grim Pharisees, and it’s all too obvious that all they really care about is cutting rich people’s taxes…I the Bain controversy is hurting Romney, and most indications are that it is, that would appear to mean that more Americans than just left-wingers are taking the issue seriously… The party has no moderate faction anymore. The GOP today is a rump amalgamation of plutocrats and the people who service their air conditioning. Its middle has been hollowed out.

Tomasky notes that Romney is “a pretty perfect expression of what the GOP has become.” Yet, he cautions, “Mitt might win. A presidential election is a menu with only two options, meat and fish. And if fish has $1.5 billion behind it, and is financing a successful drive to keep meat supporters from being able to vote in key states, then fish can pull out a victory. But the odds are against it for a good reason, a reason that Jefferson identified.”
Given Tomasky’s insights, the Democrats’ have a clear challenge — to define the aristocratic character of the GOP in such a convincing way that a sizable portion of the white working class, regardless of whatever cultural distaste they may share toward liberals, will find it impossible to vote for Romney and down-ballot Republicans.