I don’t generally post on things that don’t interest me. That explains my silence over the topic that’s dominating the political blogosphere, television pundits, and the opinion pages of the major newspapers: Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate. It will have next to no influence over my decision on how to engage in the futile gesture of voting. Futile because I live in Illinois and there has never really been any doubt that Illinois’s electoral votes will go to Obama.
I’ll only add one observation that I’ve already made over at OTB. In nominating Paul Ryan Mitt Romney is doubling down on Americans’ disinterest in foreign policy. Paul Ryan is the epitome of Congressional Republicans’ strategy in domestic policy. I don’t think that policy is vile but I do think it’s objectively incorrect. I.e., I don’t think that cutting taxes for those who actually pay taxes (the rich) will create jobs, I don’t think that nudging heatlhcare towards privatization will induce its costs to decline, and I don’t think that the majority of Americans have the material capacity to save for their own retirements and even if they did some sort of minimum elderly income subsidy would continue to be required.
The convergence of the neocons with the evangelical base of the GOP means, I think, a neocon foreign policy much as we had with Bush. I think James is much too optimistic. Since this kind of foreign policy is pretty much a given, I dont think Romney needed a real FP guru for VP. Put Wolfowitz/Cheney clones in at NSA, SecDef and Sec of State and just do whatever they say.
On the domestic front, I hope it will force Romney to commit to some specifics, especially in health care. His current plan is repeal with no replace. If they are going to use something like the PCA, which Ryan helped write, I hope they get it scored. It has some merits and is worthy of discussion. If you are interested, HSI did score it (via Salam), but I am not sure of their objectivity.
http://www.hsinetwork.com/HSI_Report_on_PCHOICE_07-21-2009.pdf
Steve
That was my thought as well.
I live in Florida and so my vote will matter more, but the choice of Ryan doesn’t help me at all.
Since I don’t think a VP has ever been picked for foreign policy reasons (though more than a few since WWII have been picked as Washington insiders to allay concerns about lack of national experience), I expect this tradition to continue.
On foreign policy, I think Romney is probably at heart more Hamiltonian, to Obams’s Wilsonian, but I can also buy that Romney’s foriegn policy approach appears more Clintonian.
@Dave Schuler and Others
… one observation that I’ve already made over at OTB. …
You all must have strong stomachs. I tried to follow some of the comments about the Chick-fil-A controversy, the Senator Reid comments, and anti-Romney ads. In my opinion, it is a sewer. I used to follow the Daily Kos, but it quickly became a sewer as well. It is the “win at any costs”, “the ends justify the means”, “I’m right and you’re evil”, etc. that I find nauseating.
I try to consider the arguments of others. They either help to strengthen my position or to modify/trash it.
@Drew – I think you are wrong about the housing mess, but I am taking a second look at the issue.
@ Steve Verdon – I am never sure if we disagree or not, but I do try to follow your arguments. The economic theory makes my head explode.
@Ben Wolf – I still think you are wrong, but I have re-examined my positions against yours.
@Michael Reynolds – I disagree with most of your positions, but your “slippery slope” argument made me rethink my initial “doomsday” thinking on the Supreme Court ruling about the PPACA.
@others – I agree and disagree with you all, but I consider your comments.
While things may devolve into a food fight, it very rarely gets nasty. I do appreciate the discourse. This is not meant to be a love-fest, and I am not on anybody’s d*ck.
@steve
If this election goes like I think it will, the Ryan plan will be rammed through with little change. It will be the reverse of the healthcare bill, but each side will use the others side’s previous arguments.
His plan seemed to be a good plan to start, and it would provide robust debate about the issues. Some parts would need to be thrown out and others revised. I would appreciate being proven wrong.
NOTE: The present partisan environment began 20 to 25 years ago at least. To many people, the recent past is the last 10 years, and anything before their grandfather’s time is ancient history. Most people tend to forget the bad things.
You and me both. It’s part of the reason that it’s been so long since I’ve posted there. I’m dispirited. That and that nobody cares about foreign policy which is what I post on over there.
It’s also why I try to concentrate on policy rather than on politics over here. I honestly don’t care who wins or who loses. I care about the policies. As you might suspect right about now I’m pretty discouraged. It also might be because I know more about politics, real politics, than 99.9% of those who comment at OTB.
RE: Foreign Policy
The US ain’t starting anything anytime soon. Ain’t gonna happen. Anybody advocating foreign intervention will be considered the crazy uncle at best.
I am a hawk’s hawk. I would bomb somebody every 10 years, but even I am tired of our half-assed operations. I understand we are re-positioning our European equipment to the Pacific. Good. Let Europe defend themselves. We should get the hell out of South Korea and Japan. If Romney wins, he will discover things are very different from the Oval Office.
We can use Guam to position the assets. The Marine Corps keeps a few pre-positioning ships ready with equipment, and if I recall correctly, they can provision a regiment. A battalion can be in country and equipped in three weeks. The Army has airborne units that have the same capacity, but I am not sure how large.
We may not have a choice. It may just happen to us. Here’s the scenario: Netanyahu decides to attack Iran some time in the next 80 days.
To position myself with respect to the use of military force I used to think of myself as a hawk but that’s becoming harder since I’ve opposed every use of force by the U. S. over the period of the last 30 years on pragmatic grounds.
I detest Paul Ryan in the same way I detested John Edwards, as a poseur whose image is a product of media management. I’m totally unmotivated by the candidates for this election and have tired of the “most important election blah blah blah” vomited into the media every four years. If you really want to see a sewer read Balloon Juice, which appears to have literally become an Obama campaign blog.
I detest Paul Ryan in the same way I detested John Edwards, as a poseur whose image is a product of media management.
Ben, how has the media mangement molded the image of Paul Ryan? This is not meant as a facetious question, either, As, you usually deliver less intense opinions than the one you have about Ryan — opinions which, whether or not I agree with, I respect.
@Dave Schuler
… Netanyahu decides to attack Iran some time in the next 80 days.
I will change “ain’t gonna happen” to “probapaly ain’t gonna happen”. The Azerbaijan base story came and went with no follow up. I was skeptical at the time. I am still skeptical, but if they couls fly re-fueling operations out or over Azerbaijan, an air strike is possible.
I am still not sure who is Israel’s intended audience. There is a lot of realpolitik afoot.
I think everybody is waiting for the Arab Spring getting to Iran. Combined with the sanctions, computer viruses, scientist assassination, and other clandestine operations, the Arab Spring may take out the Mullahs. If this is the case, I suspect it will not go as planned. I am guessing Iran has learned from Syria to not drag out operations. Killing 20k + quickly will quell any opposition. The world will bitch about it, but nobody will do anything.
The Middle -East is going to explode, and it will spread.
@jan
Ryan’s budgets were incoherent. Sloppy. They leave us with far more questions than they ever answered, such as how to reduce deficits. Ryan’s plan would have left that for politicians forty or fifty years down the road. His Medicare proposal would never have kept pace with rising medical costs, which his plan never addressed. In fact I would argue this is exactly the problem with his work, that it sets goals but leaves unanswered how we’ll ever get there.
Look, I’ll never be in the media spotlight let alone the de facto leader of a party. But if someone came to me and asked that I write a plan to correct our budgetary problems, that it will provide the fundamental rallying point for the short-term political future, you can bet I’ll be devoting every waking minute to producing the most iron-clad, detailed policy proposal one can craft. I would not have left the gaping holes which permitted Barack Obama to tear it apart in just a few speeches.
I don’t accept Ryan’s “mastery” of budgets. He’s made too many egregious errors he couldn’t address when confronted. There are wiser Republicans in my opinion, with a much greater grasp in this area who were sidelined when the Tea Party took center stage in 2010 and it’s to the Republicans’ detriment. Ryan can rev up the crowds with grand slogans and catch-phrases but when it comes time to get things done he won’t have the intellectual grounding to govern effectively.
That was my take, too, expressed here. I could search for the post.
I think there’s an underlying and false assumption: that our healthcare cost problems are a result of excessive demand, a consequence of the subsidies. I think that there’s both a demand component and a supply component and of the two the supply component is the more significant.
I have a hard time separating out demand vs supply issues in medicine. I think provider induced demand is a big problem and I think that looks a lot like a supply issue. We do see that utilization varies quite widely across different areas. Costs are often highest in areas where there are the most providers, where competition could be in play or just supply and demand setting lower prices. Conversely, in rural areas where there are few docs, costs are often lower.
I will say that few who write about health care, at least the people I read, express this as a pure demand problem. There is an assumption that we have a lot of demand not being met.
Steve
Ryan strikes me as too big for his britches. Much like that young Anthony Weiner.
I’ve heard they worked out together. I wonder if they Facebook each other.
I would not have left the gaping holes which permitted Barack Obama to tear it apart in just a few speeches.
Fair enough, Ben. But, Obama can tear anything apart in a few minutes by parlaying a few distortions in a speech, which gets picked up by the media, expanded, and then left up to a given plan’s creator to unravel such misinformation, going on counter defensive mode. And, like Howard Dean adroitly said today on a news show, voters don’t want to be tutored about plans. They don’t want power points. In other words Dean is saying that the average person just wants to be pointed in a direction, and he will unthinkingly vote without looking into any factual content.
That’s kind of sad.
I admit to not having all the nuts and bolts of the Ryan plan in place, just the broader bullet points. But, when I have the time will find what Ryan’s latest version contains, especially the piece of legislation he co-wrote with Sen. Ron Wyden of OR. Perhaps this is even a topic that can be discussed in a thread on this blog, if it’s of interest.
In the meantime, my perspective of Ryan differs from yours, in that I simply ‘like’ and have the utmost respect for the guy. Unlike Edwards, who you compare him to, he exemplifies just the opposite in his genuineness and his follow-through. He seems self-disciplined, whether it’s following a diet/health regime to counter bad genetics, blending his responsibilities of family and work by sleeping in his DC office and flying home every weekend, or committing political suicide by at least opening up real conversations (by having a plan on paper) about third rail issues that every other politician has shied away from. If his plan has holes in it, at least it can be said to be a bonified platform that can originate and propel discussions forward about some of the real problems fiscally facing us. Holes also can be mended. Alternative legislation, like Ryan’s, can be fortified, edited, re-worked if at least people are willing to admit there are indeed such problems intrinsically associated with those ‘holes,’ and then willing to definitively construct something better. This is what I am hearing Romney wants to do, by embracing changes to the status quo, that Ryan’s plan symbolizes.
Regarding his intellectual capacities….both side of the aisles don’t take issue with how smart or capable Ryan is. What is held in disagreement are his ideas and mythology on how to get from pt. A to pt. B effectively. Also, Ryan seems to have had working relationships with both dem and R’s, which is probably why he was able to work out with the now disgraced Anthony Weiner, in sync with his practice of preventive measures in order to maintain good health, in lieu of lousy family history.
I think that’s a problem inherent to the supply bottleneck which cannot be resolved in the context of a fee-for-service compensation model.
“. If his plan has holes in it, at least it can be said to be a bonified platform that can originate and propel discussions forward about some of the real problems fiscally facing us.”
His plans have many of the same holes that Obama plans have. Since Obama has to submit budgets, there is a lot more detail in his plans, so you know if he is willing to raise taxes and you know what he is willing to cut. However, on the big ticker important stuff, ie health care, they both get awfully vague about how to get to that GDP plus 0.5% target. My bias is that Ryan has more magical thinking but YMMV.
Steve
There are wiser Republicans in my opinion, with a much greater grasp in this area who were sidelined when the Tea Party took center stage in 2010 and it’s to the Republicans’ detriment.
Gotta disagree. If there were wiser Republicans, where were they from January 2001 to January 2007? Just because things have gotten much worse since January 2007 doesn’t mean it wasn’t awful before hand. Old Republican hands don’t care any more about the things like deficits than do people like Paul Krugman and Barack Obama.
Ryan strikes me as too big for his britches. Much like that young Anthony Weiner.
I’ve heard they worked out together. I wonder if they Facebook each other.
I read somewhere that Ryan is 6’2″ and 163 pounds. “A lean and hungry look” springs to mind as well as the idea that he’s a bit obsessed with his looks if he’s working out a lot.
Now there’s an interesting pair of homonyms:
“Bonified” meaning ameliorated and “bona fide” meaning good faith.
Ricochet has a spirited article on the Ryan choice called: Declaration of War, as does George will with his article entitled Romney’s Presidential Pick.
Both of these opinion pieces catch the flavor of those who are up in arms regarding the direction the Obama administration is taking this country. If you like the way we’re going then you’ll probably see these men’s expressions of frustration as overdone. But, if you oppose or feel trapped in the growing controls government is placing on states, businesses and it’s citizens then you may feel a rapport with the sentiments expressed in their forthright wording.
“Bonified†meaning ameliorated and “bona fide†meaning good faith.
That was an interesting detail of language to note, Dave. However, my usage of the word was more in the ‘slang’ meaning ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ rather than improved or good faith.
Ben,
I’m not sure how that is different from just about any proposal out there, not that I’m a fan of the Ryan Plan.
A budget proposal that seriously addresses our budgetary problems will have the streets of Washington run red with the blood of sacred cows. I wouldn’t expect such a budget to come from anyone sitting in office because the reaction would be pretty obvious.
I have to admit to the fundamentally intellectually correct position that the executive is first a foreign policy arm.
However, when your own house is a mess, you end up making concessions to compromised foreign policy. First and foremost, see energy policy. Then look at trade and the effect on manufacturing. Etc.
Seems to me we need to get our house in order. Our finances are a mess. After a reset of trajectory we can go from there. I realize the world waits for no one, especially today Iran. But I sure would rather be dealing with that with sound financial and resource footing at home than from weakness. Our decades long policy of giving away goodies to spoiled brats has to end.
@Icepick
“’A lean and hungry look’ springs to mind as well as the idea that he’s a bit obsessed with his looks if he’s working out a lot.”
Well I’m vain too, so I wouldn’t necessarily hold that against him.
@jan
“In the meantime, my perspective of Ryan differs from yours, in that I simply ‘like’ and have the utmost respect for the guy. Unlike Edwards, who you compare him to, he exemplifies just the opposite in his genuineness and his follow-through.”
I think this amounts to a primarily philosophical difference between us more than anything else. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no such thing as a good politician. There are some that I’ve liked, but when I scratch a few millimeters beneath the surface I’ve always found slime. I’m not sure anyone who would run for office, a position of power over others, is really qualified for it.
My dad, who came from a family of politicians, once remarked that in order to be elected to higher office you’ve compromised your principles so frequently you no longer have any.
I just see him as a callow snotwad. My stepson is older than he is. And quite possibly a better man.
Having a bad week, Janis?
It’s been a bad 2 months or so. My husband died July 19, Drew, from a sudden illness.
Condolences, Janis.
I have never lost a spouse but they say it’s one of life’s greatest stressors. Be good to yourself. I can only imagine.
It will get different. Maybe not better but different.
Thank you, Dave. Luckily, my husband was a careful and completely open man. He left me in very good shape legally and experientially, and provided for until I can get back on my feet.
I don’t have most of the worries many women do.
Janis
So sorry to read about the loss of your husband. I can’t even imagine the burden of grief you must be experiencing, let alone just the shock, if it was unexpected. Anyway, you have my deepest empathy…….
Thanks, jan. We have our differences, but we’re both trying.
Let’s not make this thread about me. The topic is Ryan and policy.