Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker profile of Paul Ryan shows just what kind of a looter and moocher Ryan is back home in his district, where Janesville’s economy was destroyed by the closing of a GM plant:
[…]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. […] 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. […] As Janesville increasingly becomes a base for the business of distribution logistics, its single most pressing economic concern is good roads. [Ryan supporter] Beckord pointed toward Interstate 90, which runs southeast a hundred miles to Chicago. […] 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. […] 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.
There’s nothing new about a Congressman who talks tough in DC but gets re-elected on pork, but let’s not allow the collective Village erection obscure the fact that Ryan is nothing new, and he represents a district that’s heavily dependent on the federal dole.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
This VP pick seems too good to be true. What am I missing?
Omnes Omnibus
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I am putting down to the epic fail tis is Romney the candidate. It is the only explanation that I can find.
Villago Delenda Est
Any district that repeatedly elects scum like Ryan frankly deserves to be cut off from the Federal teat and allowed to die.
Redshift
I’m a bit too late to get in on this thread when it was live, but there’s more to learn from the New Yorker profile. To my mind, the really important thing to learn from the article is that Obama basically maneuvered the Congressional GOP into adopting Paul Ryan and his plan as the face of the party. Ryan is portrayed as a firm believer in his own brilliance, and also a true believer that his direction is the future of conservatism, even if it looks like electoral disaster. And now Obama has backed Romney into a corner where he feels his best shot is to pick a guy that Obama has *already* backed into a corner once, using his ego and his ideology. We often marvel at Obama’s luck in choosing his opponents and joke about eleven-dimensional chess, but there is actually a visible chain of events that led to this point.
maryQ
So Ryan is a seven-term congressman not because he is a principled conservative who jerks off to Ayn Rand, but because he is an effective government advocate for his constituents. He effectively and appropriately brings essential services and resources to his area and, lo and behold, people and businesses benefit. He, as a representative of, you know, Teh Guvermint, works with the private sector to provide incentives in the face of market failures.
I believe in this kind of government. You know who else does? Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
You know who also does, when it suits them, but claims not to on the national stage? Mitt Romeny and Paul Ryan. And you know why they claim not to believe in it? Because they don’t want every moocher and strapping young buck to think that the government is supposed to work for them.
And you know why? Because it f@$&ing costs money, and they would rather have the money for their car elevators than pay taxes so that your sorry ass town can have a bridge or a new school or fewer unemployed people. Because if they actually deserved not to be unemployed, they would not be unemployed. And if that bridge really needed to be built, then the private sector would just build it. And vouchers.
I am so not looking forward to the two-week media wank fest that we are about to endure before a critical mass of people wake up to this crap.
But be patient. We may pull through.
maryQ
@Redshift: I like this, and often think the same. This line of thinking is generally well supported by facts and outcomes. I just sure freaking hope it holds true this time.
Beauzeaux
“The isotope, known as a medical tracer, is made outside the United States”
In that soshalist haven, Canada.
xian
@Redshift: Yes. Two things have become clear. One is that at least since the debt-ceiling debacle (if not earlier), Obama (meaning the man and his team in general) has been aware that the Republicans have severely disabled their own range of motion in several political dimensions and because of this, he can literally make them do certain things (with their only out being to violate one of their Norquistian prior axioms and break the surface tension of their whole nihilistic strategy). The Republicans dutifully choose door number 3 again and again.
The second thing is that Obama has been playing a very long game: sidelining Huntsman, angling for Romney, “forcing” (in the sense of a card magician) Ryan. He spent 2+ years freaking out firebaggers and even some of the most loyal long-suffering obots at least in part to inoculate himself against just about every possible Republican line of attack. At the same time he opened up for himself multiple lines of attack against his preferred target, on his chosen battlefield, within conceptual “frames” that favor him, with gamed out fallbacks and countermoves for every possible response (remembering, again, that the responses available to Republicans are now self-limiting and predictable).
Feels somewhat similar to the way the campaign as a whole has multiple paths to victory in the electoral college, as compared to the RR limited-liability holding company, which has exactly one: win all swing states.
maryQ
@xian: excellent analysis. And ya know what rocks my world? While all this multidimensional chess has been going on, he also f@$&ing governed.
kideni
It’s not as if Janesville’s a boomtown. Those jobs that are coming into town pay $9 or $10 an hour, which hardly matches the $20 to $30 people used to get at the GM plant, and unemployment is still quite high. Even people who say nice things about him note that his concern is mostly about DC, not local needs.