Ezra Klein is worried that the Obama administration has created a monster by “helping vault” Paul Ryan to the national stage. His piece is worth a read because he makes a fairly convincing case that Obama made sure that the Ryan plan was the face of the Republican Party. But, this I don’t understand:
Putting the Ryan budget at the center of the 2012 election has the tactical benefit of forcing Republicans to defend an unpopular proposal; more important, it has the long-term strategic benefit of potentially discrediting the Ryan budget as a political document. Prior to Ryan joining the ticket, a Romney loss seemed likely to strengthen the Republican Party’s conservative wing, because the defeat would be blamed on Romney’s moderate past. Now, if the Romney-Ryan ticket loses, it will vindicate skeptics of the party’s rightward shift, potentially strengthening the party’s moderates. That could produce a more cooperative opposition for Obama to work with in a second term.
But if Obama loses, Republicans will have won the presidency with a mandate to enact a deeply conservative agenda. Left to his own devices, Romney might have been a relatively pragmatic and cautious president. Instead, the Obama administration’s three-year effort to enshrine the Ryan budget at the heart of the Republican Party would prove to have been a crucial push toward enacting that budget into law.
How the hell can someone who’s been watching the last few years write these two paragraphs? A Romney loss will not make the opposition more cooperative unless its accompanied by some Harry Potter-type enchantment. The opposition has been slowly but surely primarying anyone who’s shown an inclination to vote for anything reasonable, and those nutjobs will still be around. And who’s this theoretical centrist Romney that all the pundits are talking about? What’s been coming out of the mouth of the 2012 Romney is virtually indistinguishable from the rest of his primary opponents, and there’s no reason to think that a Romney plus a Republican House and Senate would legislate anything but the kind of stuff that’s been pooped out by the Republican House in the last two years, with or without Ryan on the ticket.
The reason the Obama team kept goading the Republicans on Ryan is because they wanted to have this fight out in the open. A T-Paw or P-Man or some other Caspar Milquetoast who wouldn’t let butter melt in his mouth would have laid down a “compassionate conservative” smokescreen trying to sand the rough edges off of Ryan’s Galtian manifesto, even though a Romney/Pawlenty Administration would want exactly the same coupon program of Ryan’s dreams. With the man himself on the ticket, we can dispense with the treacly bullshit portion of our program and proceed directly to throwing punches.
By the way, the reason they call it a “fight” is because you might fucking lose. It’s fine for Ezra to remind us of this fact, but he shouldn’t pretend like it’s a major discovery that a President running on a shit economy might not get a second term.
Steve
Yeah, um, I will take that chance. Considering every Republican in Congress already voted for Ryan’s budget, I would rather bring it to national attention and actively campaign against it – win or lose – than play it safe in hopes that centrist President Romney might veto that budget someday. Not that I think we will lose.
OzoneR
I didn’t get that at all from that. What I got from that is its dangerous for the President to try to hang his hat on the Ryan plan because if he loses because of the economy, he still gave them carte blanche to destroy the social safety net by trying to make it about that.
Another words, you can’t try to make this election about Paul Ryan, lose, and then say “well it was actually about the economy, the public never gave any thumbs up to Ryan”
JPL
WOW! Hopefully Ezra reads this because that window moved a long time ago.
Eric
If u want a federal government like the government they have in kansas vote romney ryan. If not. Vote obama biden and quit whining and man a station
Valdivia
Ezra in general gets a lot of things right–specially the details of policy and the number stuff that seems to go above the heads of the Village–but in pure political terms he is not that great an analyst.
A few interesting things I saw on PoliticalWire just now. 1) Romney needs Ryan by his side because otherwise he hates campaigning and lacks energy
2)Apparently it was the Romney Collective that overruled the political advisers for him to go with Ryan (Ann who has great ‘people instincts’ and the sons. /ha ha ha ha ha
SteveinSC
Lately Ezra’s getting a little like the Rooster who believed his crowing brought forth… well you know.
Steve
@OzoneR: Bush ran in 2004 on staying the course in Iraq and the minute he got re-elected, he claimed a mandate to privatize Social Security. We know the Republicans are going to define the meaning of the election however they want to, win or lose. So it’s not really worth worrying about handing them a mandate to pass a budget they already passed.
maurinsky
I don’t follow the logic that a Romney-as-moderate loss would somehow magically make the right moderate more. One of the maxims of contemporary Republicanism is that conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed, and a Romney-as-moderate losing would feed into that – he wasn’t conservative enough, so he lost. The story wouldn’t be that he was moderate enough that there was no difference between Obama/Romney, but that his moderation meant True Conservatives had no one to vote for.
MattF
I’d put this in the “contrarian articles get more hits” file– the headline should be “If Obama Loses, We’re Screwed.” Well, duh.
jibeaux
is just a phrase that no one who’s been paying attention could write.
Valdivia
@Steve:
Not only that. Romney not only has a transition team ready, they are ALREADY looking at everything they can cut and sell off, just like he did at Bain. Story is up at the NYT. So Ryan in this sense is irrelevant, they were going to do it and call it a mandate no matter what.
cat48
As always, Obama’s Fault!
FlipYrWhig
Republicans got their sorry asses stomped at every level in 2008, and still decided that their first priority was to throw monkey wrenches into everything the new guy tried. Their strategy doesn’t change based on victory or loss.
Brian R.
@Eric:
Fixed that for you.
OzoneR
@Steve:
which, of course, failed because the country (and media) turned around and said “what a minute, you didn’t tell us you were going to do that”
sdhays
@Steve: Exactly! They will do whatever they are allowed to do whether they had a “mandate” or not. It’s not worth worrying about. The only thing worth worrying about is denying them the power to flush the country further down the toilet.
Mudge
It’s simple. All notable Republicans are sociopaths and they all lie. Ezra seems to refuse to believe either and acts as if Republicans are rational and truthful.
Case in point. It is perfectly rational, given the number of lies that Romney has spewed during the campaign (see Steve Benen) to believe that Romney’s statement that he paid at least 13% in taxes each year is a boldface lie. No beltway pundit has yet to say such, nor will they. I suspect Ezra will fully believe the statement and maybe start fiddling with the numbers (the 13% of what question).
FlipYrWhig
@OzoneR: It failed because the Pelosi-led Democrats said they didn’t care that Bush had won the election, they still weren’t going to let him get his plan through them. Republicans do that too.
jheartney
A fact the administration might have considered back when they were insisting that the original, tax-cut-stunted stimulus was adequate all by itself.
NonyNony
@OzoneR:
Not really. It failed because it was really, really unpopular and there was enough pushback against it that Congressional Republicans got spooked.
Congressional Republicans have gotten more extreme since then. They won’t spook next time, and it doesn’t matter if Romney won on a platform of “jobs, jobs, jobs” or if Romney won on a platform of “cut social programs 100%”. Whatever they hand to him he’ll sign, and what they’ll hand to him is something that looks like the Paul Ryan budget. Making that front-and-center and making people actually take that choice is important.
What Klein seems to be saying is that it would be better if voters had the truth hidden from them rather than having Romney’s real agenda public. That isn’t how democracy is supposed to work. The voters get the choice, and if it turns out that we live in a country where given a choice the majority of voters vote to cut the social welfare network off at the knees then we have to deal with that. But at least the choice is placed in front of them transparently, and they aren’t voting a Republican Congress and a Republican President into place with the fantasy that they’re going to leave Medicare and Social Security alone while creating jobs like Romney wanted to be able to say he was going to do.
Comrade Mary
Hey kids, who’s up for Mad Libs?
Left to his own devices, Romney could have sprouted wings, turned pink, and flown above Capitol Hill, oinking gently in the breeze.
Left to his own devices, Romney could have rescued the Kobayashi Maru with no loss of life while distributing ponies to all.
Left to his own devices, Romney could have defined exactly what comes between “Collect underpants” and “PROFIT!”.
kay
I think I’m a bigger fan of Ezra Klein than a lot of people here, I think he actually understands the policy and law he describes, and there’s no way to do that without working at it. He genuinely adds value, not just opinion.
Which is why I’m baffled when he ventures into conjecture and punditry and campaign advice. Anyone can do that. Thousands of people DO do that. It isn’t what sets him apart.
I feel the same way about Paul Krugman. Their value as liberals is what they know. I have no idea why they feel they have to play campaign manager.
We have BETTER and smarter wonks than they do. That’s an advantage for liberals. They should stick to what they do, and leave tactics to campaign people.
He can write whatever he wants, but I’d like it if he’d address what the Ryan voucher plan would do to health insurance premiums for those younger than 65. Ryan wants to dump the sickest part of the population onto the private health insurance market. Right now, they’re not in it. What is that going to do to health insurance premiums across the board?
different-church-lady
Wait… he’s somehow saying Obama forced the Ryan pick? Because short of that it’s not going to make a scrap of difference whether he attacks or ignores the Ryan plan. If they get elected the ticket is going to do what they want to do, no matter how the campaign went, and the GOP is going to claim mandate whether the margin is 15 votes in Ohio or 100 electorals.
El Cid
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That’s fucking absurd.
(1) Republicans use whatever power they grab to impose a rapaciously harmful agenda as quickly as possible precisely because they wish to do so before any next election might send them out.
THEY WILL TREAT ANY CAPTURE OF POWER AS A MANDATE BECAUSE THEY’VE JUST GOTTEN OFFICIAL POWER.
They don’t give a fuck whether or not ‘the people’ or the pundit class feel like they ‘have a mandate’.
(2) A Republican President ‘governing pragmatically’ — particularly with a likely-to-continue Republican House and perhaps Senate is an absolutely idiotic fantasy.
What the fuck?
wonkie
This is the second peice that I know of from Ezra that kind of stinks of Beltway sucking up, like he’s writing stuff to get himself in with the Beltway politica writer incrowd. This piece is in the faux insight contrarian mode.
aimai
Ezra is always too clever by half. That is, he thinks he is. But everything he writes still sounds like jumped up collegiate pseudo sophistication. In reality approximately half the people don’t vote (but a huge proportion of those not voting are not voting because they are basically satisfied with Obama), another huge swathe are being actively prevented from voting by lower level Republican officials, still others are being actively lied to at all times about what their party actually stands for (we are saving Medicare, not destroying it would be a good example) and, finally, a recent study demonstrated that if a program is popular but supported by the working class and middle class it has 0 chance of getting enacted while something supported heavily by the lobbyists of the wealthy gets through congress with 90 percent efficacy.
My point here is what the hell does this have to do with politics as an argument? Nothing. Once people are in power they will say whatever they have to to give a little retroactive gloss of legitimacy to their nakedly venal political acts. Twas ever thus. Obama’s re-election strategies have got nothing to do with it. TheRepublicans will do whatever they need to do to keep pushing their programs. IF that includes (as it does) calling Bill and Hillary Clinton drug runners and murderers in the 90’s and then turning around and praising both of them for at least being white and respectable this year during this election cycle they will do it. Shameless is the primary component. Not logic.
aimai
rea
Grover Norquist has already explained to us that all they need is a Republican president capable of signing his name to whatever bills are passed by a Republican congress. This firebagger–“President Romney–just like President Obama but with less drones” nonsense is out of touch with reality.
MattMinus
Seems like Ezra has gone full metal villager. Oh, so contrarian. “Watch as I demonstrate how it’s a mistake to attack where your opponent is weak.”
What the fuck is a mandate anyway? If the republicans gain power by the slimmest margin, they will enact the most conservative plan possible.If they gain power by a wide margin, they will enact the exact same plan. They’ll run on saving social security, and then destroy it. They’ll stay silent about abortion during the election, and claim they have a mandate to ban it if they win.
If they are defeated, they will not feel rebuked or that their program has been rejected.The problem will be that dead people voted, or the 17th amendment, or stupid voters were bought with welfare, etc.
Mandates are just something that pundits talk about.
Triassic Sands
Damn, now I’m going to have to have my jaw wired, it hit my chest so hard.
Romney showed what kind of president he will be, without question, when he chose Ryan as his running mate. All the nonsense about Romney being “moderate” is just so much crap. He’s whatever he needs to be to get what he wants.
If he wins in November, the odds are he’ll have a GOP House and Senate to work with — a
very conservativeradical House and Senate. The last thing in the world this utterly character-free cipher is going to do is buck power-mad GOP majorities. (I’d expect to see the end of the filibuster, too, if the Senate Republicans find it’s preventing them from running roughshod over the not-so-courageous Democrats.)That’s why I’m convinced that, if elected, Romney will take over Bush’s once seemingly secure position as the Worst President Ever. It’s bad enough that he has no core beliefs of his own, but now he is drawing his identity from the lunatics.
That’s also why I want to believe the American people can’t possibly be stupid enough to elect him. But then I think about the American people and I realize just how precarious our future is.
How did we get here?
Linda Featheringill
I think it’s important for the people of this country to have a clear understanding of the consequences of their votes. The differences this time are stark. Having Ryan in the spotlight helps to make those differences clear. But this is for the benefit of the people.
The benefit for Obama appears if you think folks are clear-headed enough to understand the choices and act in their own best interest. I think that Obama believes that.
The benefit for me is that if folks clearly understand what is at stake and vote for the Republicans anyway, then I can let them have it and I’ll walk away from the fray. I’ll just continue my DFH ways and lead my Bohemian life wherever I am and try to enjoy myself.
ed
Perhaps Ezra should stroll on over to Red State and politely inquire, “Conservatism: Can it fail?”
Quincy
@kay: Couldn’t agree more. Ezra’s political analysis is suspect, but his writing on policy is extremely useful because he’s one of the only mainstream voices that does it. Obviously he’s far from perfect, there are better wonks, but not any who regularly dominate WaPo’s “most read” column.
TK-421
Ezra has a lot of respect among Dems, and has a certain amount of credibility. It is depressing that someone so high up the Dem food chain can be so willfully stupid.
How much does he get paid? No, don’t tell me, on second thought I don’t want to know.
The Thin Black Duke
Look, it’s not that difficult to figure out. This ain’t quantum physics. Hell, it ain’t even a New York Times crossword puzzle.
Bottom line, the GOP is motherfucking crazy.
And anybody who pretends otherwise is suicidal.
Valdivia
@kay:
I am totally with you Kay! I love his hard-facts analysis it’s the punditry I think he totally misses.
Waynski
Even if there are some Republicans who want to work with the President to fix things, they can’t vote that way or they’ll be primaried by the Teahadis — even if Obama wins. So, effectively, there are no Republican moderates. Anyone who considers themselves a Republican moderate should either switch sides or band together and form a new party, because the party in its current construction doesn’t want you anymore. And unless Grover Norquist chokes on a piece of steak at the Capital Grille, that’s the way it’s going be for a long time.
kay
Justices Scalia and Alito spent a lot of time debating (in their role as Senators, I guess) how UNFAIR it was that younger people were going to be forced to enter into an insurance pool with people younger than 65.
Paul Ryan wants to put 22 year olds into a pool that includes the elderly. Jesus. Talk about generational cost-shifting.
The only reason any of us have affordable health insurance at all is we took the entire high-risk portion of the population out of the pool with Medicare.
Ryan wants to put them back in. That’s insane. No one will have affordable health insurance. Not younger people now, and not older people later.
This is like the worst idea in the world. Everyone loses.
catclub
@NonyNony: “Whatever they hand to him he’ll sign, and what they’ll hand to him is something that looks like the Paul Ryan budget.”
I suspect that they might blanch at that. It would be electoral suicide, and they know it. It is only not suicide when it is a symbolic vote to ‘lower deficits’. They hate the fact that democrats are running against their ‘only symbolic’ vote to starve granny.
Steve
@OzoneR: Do you really think that was why it failed? I don’t. I doubt Democrats would be able to whip up much public sentiment by saying, “Hey Republicans, you never told us during the campaign that you were going to pass that budget that every single one of you already voted for last year!”
catclub
@Linda Featheringill: “then I can let them have it and I’ll walk away from the fray”
HL Mencken: Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and they should get it good and hard.
General Stuck
Republican economic philosophy died as a viable self contained theory, the day Hank Paulson came begging congress for TARP 1. They were dead in the water when it came to straight faced promotion of the failed ideas that were left after the collapse.
Then the hyperpure Tea Party came along and pumped some life back into the party, reanimating it like some kind of repossessed corpse. And the motley crew old guard jumped aboard with Jim Dement and that ilk at the helm. I mean, they took the mission, what the hell else were they gonna do?
So now, it is full speed ahead with crystaline pure wingnuttery on about every issue. And gone are most of the costumes to dress up the eternal purposes of why the GOP has existed in the first place. To horde wealth amongst a few, and to set groups of Americans against each other long enough to fill the money bags.
It is out in the open now, at the behest of the Malkin’s of the party, do or die with Unmitigated zeal and purpose that was always there, but filtered and fed to the people using all sorts of moderate dressings.
I think Romney was smart enough to see that writing on the wall, and threw in with the tea tard mob, for better or worse, and chose one of their darlings to keep them animating the dead republican duck.
As for medicare, people are not stupid on the simple matters of what it is. A government guaranteed retirement program, along with SS. Seniors especially get this, even though their senses ain’t what they once was on most other matters. If that is the unyielding end game for the nutters, and it seems more and more like it is. To destroy that basic promise to a society by their government, then they are doomed electorally. Whether this election or next.
NonyNony
@catclub:
They’ve reached the point where it’s also electoral suicide to NOT vote for it. Their party is now controlled by people at the primary level who think they want the Ryan Budget passed. If they don’t pass something like the Ryan budget, they’ll get primaried. And their districts are so jerry-mandered in most cases that not only do extremists have a good shot at winning primaries, once they win the primaries they win the district. The Senate isn’t quite as bad yet since those are statewide elections, but you can still see how they’ve acted these last 4 years with no consequences.
They’re now in damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t territory, but with the jerrymandering the political calculus really starts to lean towards “gut the whole thing as much as possible”.
And I think Romney will act pretty much like John Kasich if he gets to the Oval Office – spend as much time as possible draining as much money as he can from the country into the pockets of his cronies, and if that makes him unpopular enough that he loses reelection, well he’ll just go cry himself to sleep on his bed made out of $100 bills.
JGabriel
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So, if Romney and Ryan are the candidates the Obama team wanted, should we be calling them The Briar Patch Kids (“Oh please Br’er Fox, whatever you do, please don’t throw me into the briar patch”)?
Or would that be unseemly gloating too close to the election?
.
Carl Nyberg
I actually do think there are Republicans who would like to get off the train, but are, well, cowards.
I think defeating the GOP is a necessary prerequisite to the GOP becoming more pragmatic and reality-based.
What I disagree with is that Romney would have been a moderate if he won.
Bullshit. He would have given the far Right everything they wanted. If a bill cleared Congress, he would sign it.
catclub
@kay: I just realized something. Under the Ryan plan, the first year people turn 65 under Vouchercare will be a MUCH smaller pool than ‘all the rest of the seniors’. They will be totally screwed by the insurers. Plus, the insurers will not have a big enough pool of them to have any clout with healthcare providers. That first group will be total pariahs.
NancyDarling
@Valdivia: Ann-toinette and the 5 Dauphins—Rmoney’s core advisers.
catclub
@NancyDarling: great band name
Kane
Ezra is making a similar argument that Sully and Frum and other “moderate” republicans have been making for some time. The notion that once the extremists are soundly defeated in 2012, then the remaining moderates of the GOP will prevail by making the argument that moving the party further to the right is not the answer. The script has a happy Hollywood ending where the GOP finally comes to its senses to work with President Obama and Democrats to solve our many challenges.
I suppose anything is possible, but it doesn’t sound plausible. For one thing, those making this argument seem to forget that it wasn’t the tea party types who conspired and crafted the cynical political strategy of obstruction and the purposeful destruction of the economy designed around the sinister notion of making a democratically elected president of the United States a one-term president. It was the so-called moderates of the republican party. And it was the same cynical GOP moderates who further damaged their republican brand in creating their tea party monster by pandering to the right-wing extremists for the short-term gains of regaining control of congress.
Dork
Pure genius.
General Stuck
Republicans are making a critical mistake with their assault on medicare, that is common for those currently running on ideological purity. That as long as as they promote some half baked privatization scheme, that TELLS seniors and the rest of us that they are offering the same product as before,. Only new and improved, without a government guarantee, cause government is evil, or something. That they can slip by these privatization schemes with a fooled electorate. They don’t realize the fact, that it is not only the substance of a retirement fund that people want. It is more the peace of mind that their government guarantees it that is valued by old folks in their twilight years, as well as those not yet retired. That is why trying to sell the voucher bullshit to seniors by promising they won’t be affected, won’t work.
JGabriel
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Carl Nyberg:
There we disagree. As someone (Rick Perlstein?) once said, “Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.”
Defeating the GOP is therefore a prerequisite to making them more crazy and intractable, a prerequisite to pushing themselves further right, a prerequisite to driving them completely around the bend.
.
kay
Under Paul Ryan’s plan, anyone under 55 is going to be paying more in private insurance premiums while they are young to cover the risk of the entry of older formerly Medicare people into private markets AND they are going to be paying Medicare, which they won’t get when they’re old.
He’s billing them twice, through their entire working life.
If anyone buys this blatant rip-off, they are insane.
Also. Ron Wyden, maverick, should have to explain why any 30 year old in their right mind would agree to HIS plan, which simply shifts federal obligations to younger people, who will pay higher premiums AND a Medicare tax under his plan.
Have to love Congress. They couldn’t control Medicare costs because they’re lobbied by providers, so they simply palm off the Medicare liability on younger people. Brave! Bold!
Amir Khalid
I wouldn’t dispute Klein’s contention that to some extent, maybe even a large extent, Paul Ryan is a creature of the Democrats’ making. Klein goes on to game out the possibility that they’ve built him up so big he might actually win the election for the Republicans. Which in itself is a worthwhile exercise.
But from what we’ve seen so far, that seems a remote possibility. Ryan hasn’t been articulating his signature budget policy well. Just hint to him that his approach to the budget, or anything, is not 100% congruent with Mitt’s, and watch him backtrack in a panic. You don’t want to leave your A game in the dressing room against him and Mitt, of course, but he’s not an opponent to be terrified of.
Valdivia
@NancyDarling: you win the internets today!
Keith G
Well i was going to comment on how it’s gonna be 100 comments on how Ezra in becoming a Villager and/or how Ezra is great a numbers but bad at politics (The K-Thug Corollary), but I see I am too late.
I see it as the case that there are 11 weeks until the election and that there will be a lot of sentences typed by those who get paid to comment on our politics several times a day. I do not know what the expected batting average is, but I expect more fly outs than hits.
It is so comforting to chose to not pay attention when a usually good thinker whiffs on one of his many daily efforts.
Rob in CT
I believed the GOP would be chastened by defeat at the polls. In 2008.
I no longer believe this. There simply isn’t any evidence for it.
rikyrah
Ezra thinks he’s smarter than he is.
kay
@catclub:
I think he’s lying. He’s not going to set up a dedicated exchange for privatized Medicare. It won’t work.
He’s going to retain a deregulated exchange with everyone in it and dump high risk older people into it.
He’s taking federal commitments to spending on the elderly and spreading them among the non-elderly.
It’s such a cowardly, sleazy way to solve a problem. Of course it saves the feds money. It simply shifts federal spending on the elderly to younger people WHILE collecting Medicare taxes from them.
It’s a hidden tax on those younger than 55. Private companies will be collecting the Paul Ryan Tax, in the form of higher premiums.
Love or hate the PPACA, at least Obama actually addressed the cost problem. Ryan pretends it doesn’t EXIST. He slyly shifts it to the next generation.
Emma
@Mudge: Actually, he wrote a very good article on the substance of “13% of what” question, which is indeed a very good question.
NancyDarling
@Valdivia: The fact that dauphin is French for dolphin makes it even more apt. Apologies to the original, ocean-dwelling Flipper.
1badbaba3
Hey Y’all, Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing! Please send suggestions!
That is all.
Bulworth
Hahahahahahahah. Um, no. He would rubber stamp everything sent him by a teabag congress.
LAC
Ezra Klein and Chris Cilliza’s appearances on TV and radio shows are why I cannot bring myself to subscribe to the Washington Post. I think David Broder is mentoring them.
Culture of Truth
Romney might have been a relatively pragmatic and cautious president.
Indeed, let’s cede the next 8 elections and have a drink. No worries at all!
After all this is what some said about Bush and that worked out great.
Culture of Truth
Pundit: Will Navel Gaze For Food
Culture of Truth
The GOP are Khan. They dare take what they wish.
Culture of Truth
Agreed, Ezra shouldn’t play campaign manager, he’s too clever by half, and this idea that we should play nice at election time, and not push things too far, in case we lose, is a sure fire recipe for… losing.
What kind of coach tells him team at the fourth quarter – “boys, we’re ahead by three points – let’s ease up because if the other team gets the ball they’re really gonna get mad.”
Ben Cisco
@Eric: Sorry, I’m Fresh Out Of Pearls AND Couches | My Ready Room
Hunter Gathers
@kay:
Explanation – because Obama hurt Wyden’s fee-fee’s by not pushing for Wyden/Bennet’s health care plan. Since Wyden’s delicate sensibilities were stomped upon by non-maverick Obama, the young have to get screwed over so Ron Wyden will be able to stop crying himself to sleep ever night. Sure, Wyden gets his Congressional pension and Congressional health insurance (which covers hurt feelings with no co-pay), but Obama gave him a sad, so fuck all those younglings.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Rob in CT:
This. Hell, 1992, 1996 and 1998 should have done the trick, were the Beltway Consensus correct on GOP Moderation.
IMO The GOP is beyond reform at this point. It must be fought to extinction, like the Whigs. (We’re about 30 years overdue for one of those semi-periodic, major party-realignments anyway).
dianne
@Mudge:
What I keep wondering about is he says he paid 20% when you count his charitable donations which would make it 7% more. Not exactly the 10% tithe to the LDS he keeps bragging about. Maybe it’s not his tax rate he’s really concerned about getting out.
Suffern ACE
@kay: It costs less for the government. It doesn’t make the costs go away. And since they keep insisting that there aren’t vouchers, I am beginning to wonder if the idea that this plan will be a gradual shift involving any support during a transition in the near term is just wishful thinking.
feebog
Ezra is half right here:
If Romney had chosen TPaw or Portman Ewric son of Ewric and the rest of the Red Staters would be making the argument that rMoney lost because he wasn’t consevative enough. Ryan makes that much more difficult.
What Ezra misses is that there are not enough “moderates” left in the Republican Party to make any difference. They are 98% batshit crazy and it is goig to take more than another Presidential election defeat to turn the crazy around.
Steve
@feebog: Ryan doesn’t make the argument much harder, if at all. The fact that Sarah Palin was batshit insane hasn’t stopped anyone from saying that McCain lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. In fact, every year since 1988 the Republicans have nominated a VP to the right of their presidential nominee.
The fact that Romney is, in fact, running a right-wing campaign will be completely lost on these people. They will still say “if only we had nominated a real conservative…”
Cacti
On what is this piece of fantasy based.
Romney’s one consistent feature has been his total lack of consistency. He’s shown himself to be a man who will abandon any previously held “principle” to climb ambition’s greased pole.
The Republican party is completely, bugfuck crazy right now. Wimpy Willard’s not going to push back against that.
Berial
Do you read Charles Pierce at Esquire because he said the same thing yesterday.
cmorenc
@OzoneR:
Regardless of whether Romney had selected Pawlenty instead of Ryan, if the GOP wins the Presidency + control of the House and Senate, they WILL destroy the social safety net by elimination and privatization, with the remains thereof converted to vouchers and 401k type plans, including social security. The difference having Ryan on the ticket makes is that this forces the GOP out naked into the sunshine, where they’ll have an extremely difficult time convincing people the would-be emperors are wearing fancy, attractive clothes. The GOP lie alleging Obama cut 700B from Medicare is a sign of how aware they are of their nakedness on this, and that they have no alternative except to persistently tell such brazen lies that they might just baffle enough folks with bullshit.
Mandate? The GOP don’t need no stinkin’ mandate if they got control of the Presidency, House, and Senate.
TenguPhule
And if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.
You never win without taking risks. Better to fight them now in a position of strength, out in the open where we can have it out as to what kind of nation we want this to be, rather then bleed to death from a thousand tiny invisible cuts.
At least this way, when the civil war comes, the GOP can be put to the sword without any qualms.
mclaren
A guy who makes $750,000 for deep throating the syphilitic cock of the Beltway Common Wisdom, that’s who can write those two paragraphs. As Sinclair Lewis remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Listen up, campers, and I’ll tell you what will actually happen this fall after Romney/Ryan go down to defeat in a much larger loss than the pundits expect.
The Republicans didn’t choose Romney because he was one of them, a True Believer, a loyal diehard Randian Galtian starve-the-beast soldier. The Republicans chose Romney because he seemed more electable than the rest of the lunatics despite the fact that Romney wasn’t a true believer.
Well, after November when Romney flames out and craters hard, the Republican party leaders will tell themselves that the real reason Romney crashed and burned at the polls wasn’t that Republicans offer insane policies and the Republican party itself has gone batshit nuts… Oh no no no no! Instead, the Tea Partiers currently in control of the Republican Party will convince themselves that the real reason they lost the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans didn’t pick a True Believer who was 100% committed to the cause, an absolute Randian soldier, a fanatical anti-tax jihadist who would publicly vow to erase the separation twixt church and state and shut down the IRS if elected and nuke Saudi Arabia and bring on WWW III if elected, so Jesus Christ can return in the Second Coming.
So when Romney/Ryan crash & burn in the general election this November, the Republican party will shuck him off like a dog getting rid of a tick and swing even farther to the right. Next presidential election cycle, the Republicans will nominate someone so far right, he’ll make Vlad the Impaler look like a liberal.
Remember: you heard it here first.
TenguPhule
Nixon never was prosecuted. Reagan and his Iran Contra team were never prosecuted and executed. Bush II and Cheney were not hanged in front of the Hague and their corpses dumped in Iraq for the locals to defile. Sarah Palin became a wingnut celebrity.
And now here we are.
Haydnseek
Ezra, Ezra, Ezra. Where did you get the absurd idea that there are Republican moderates? They are as good as gone. They had the shit primaried out of them, and the few that might still exist are as good at hiding from the teatards as Anne Franke was when hiding from the Gestapo. There will be no cooperative opposition because giving even the appearance of cooperation is the mark of death. There will always be someone crazier than you in redstate fairyland, so you have to keep the crazy train going as fast as it can, never mind that sharp curve up ahead…
Haydnseek
@El Cid: Exactly this. The Rethugs simply don’t give a fuck about anything but money and power. Fuck anybody but us, and the people that pay us to push their agenda. They aren’t rational. It’s hate, fear, and divide and conquer class warfare 24/7. They will stop at nothing, unless we reduce their numbers to the point that they can be collectively drowned in Grover Norquists toilet.
Haydnseek
@Triassic Sands: How did we get here? That’s easy! We got here on a Rascal Scooter paid for by Medicare being driven by a morbidly obese teabagger waving an American flag and carrying a misspelled sign.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ (formerly IrishGrrrl)
What I find laughable is that cons have thought all along that the President is a secret extreme liberal and that informs what they think he will do, regardless of what he says he has done and will do.
Now we have pundits, of all stripes, who think that Romney is a secret centrist, regardless what he says he will do if elected.
I think it comes down to “wishful thinking”. The cons WANT the President to be some extremist to justify their hatred. And the pundits WANT Romney to be some kind of Centrist to either justify their going so easy on the useless bastard and/or so that the bat shit crazy things Romney has been saying he’ll do once elected won’t come true.
Like my Momma always says, if wishes were fishes….