Paul Ryan: Can the fun last for the GOP?

This post originally appeared on Slate.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. makes an appearance at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Monday, Aug. 13, 2012.

/ AP Photo/Conrad Schmidt

Bob White, Mitt Romney's partner at Bain Capital and close campaign confidante, gave Paul Ryan the ultimate compliment. "We would have hired him at Bain," he told a campaign colleague. The buoyant 42-year-old Ryan did look a bit like the junior partner in the duo's first sit-down interview with Bob Schieffer on 60 Minutes, matching Romney with a checked shirt and blazer. As Ryan kicked off his first two days of campaigning he was crisp, effective, and eager to show that the boss' confidence was not misplaced. "We know who we are. We know what we believe. Now let's go do it," said Ryan Sunday.

The line sounds a little like a motivational mantra from Ryan's beloved P90X workout. The next 85 days are going to be an extreme workout for Ryan. (It will also be 85 days of Democrats calling him extreme.) The test for Ryan will be whether he has the stamina to retain that broad grin: his genial manner may be the best defense against the claims by Democrats that he wants to dismantle the social safety net and against the rigors of a campaign where his every move will be observed and analyzed.

The competition is well under way to define Paul Ryan, and it has now become a competition to define the Romney campaign as well. For the moment, at least, the Romney team has made the Ryan selection the narrative of the campaign. That means Ryan is no longer himself. Three forces are acting on this manikin: The Romney campaign, the Obama campaign, and the press. For two days the campaign gets to tell the story of its man, but now those other voices are starting to chime in. There's a lot of room for definition, if the Gallup poll is to be believed; nearly half of Republicans can't rate Ryan in a survey where six in 10 adults are not familiar enough with Ryan to offer an opinion of him.

Mitt Romney made a "bold" choice and is "placing a bet" that ideas will win the election. That's how the campaign is selling it. As Mark Halperin has expertly detailed, the Romney team produced a nearly flawless Ryan roll-out. The pitch is that these two men are a kind of Geek Squad for the nation: efficient problem solvers who love numbers and analysis. Romney has the executive skills and Ryan knows every inch of the budget, so together they will turn around the country. The pitch spans the generations: Romney, who seems like a man of the '50s, linking up with the first man on a national ticket from Generation X.

Ryan wasn't the only beaming new guy on stage this weekend. The man at the top of the ticket seemed like a fresh presence too. "Ryan jacks him up," said a campaign adviser. Romney is looser on the stump, at one point leading a cheer of "Paul! Paul! Paul!" He's clearly pleased with his pick.

So is the conservative base. The crowds at Romney/Ryan events were more raucous than they have been for Romney before. The party purists who love Ryan were going to vote against Obama anyway, but Ryan now moves those people to greater action before Election Day. Republican state offices are boasting of more volunteers. As of Sunday, the campaign reported more than $3 million in donations. The convention will look better on television with Republicans so enthusiastic and Romney has saved himself a good amount of grief in the future from conservatives who can now feel confident that he's put one of their kind on the ticket.

All of this affection glosses over some rough spots in the narrative though, as the Obama camp and the press are beginning to point out. Ryan has none of the experience Romney has said is a requirement for the job. The campaign doesn't think voters will care about Ryan's lack of executive experience if he looks like a leader. (That's why Romney boasts so much about Ryan's leadership in taking on Medicare reform.)

Campaign aides say Ryan's ability to step into the job right away if necessary was the key reason he was picked. But when asked what element in his background gave him this instant and unassailable credential to be commander in chief, they cited his oversight authority of the defense budget. They will drop this soon, just as the McCain campaign dropped the claims that Sarah Palin gained military insight from her relationship with the anti-missile batteries stationed in Alaska. It just doesn't wash. Fortunately, Barack Obama had arguably less commander-in-chief experience.

Ryan is also a longtime Washington insider. Romney spent the primaries campaigning against Washington. Now he argues that Ryan will offer the perfect complement to his executive experience because Ryan has legislative experience. But what kind of legislative experience does he have? Romney presents Ryan as a bipartisan deal-maker, but the record there is not strong. He does not have a long list of bills passed. The Huffington Post reports that he's only authored a few bills that have passed during his near 14-year tenure in Congress, none of them towering bipartisan achievements. The Romney campaign provided two examples of bipartisanship: Ryan's collaboration with Sen. Ron Wyden on a Medicare white paper and his work with Congressman Chris Van Hollen on the Expedited Legislative Line-Item Veto and Rescissions Act. Wyden has called Romney's characterization of his collaboration with Ryan "talking nonsense" and Van Hollen issued a press release for the Obama campaign attacking Ryan. "The Romney-Ryan budget is great for the wealthiest Americans like Mitt Romney," he said, "but at the expense of everyone and everything else."

This is not the first time a top candidate has oversold his record of bipartisan accomplishment. Sen. Barack Obama made claims to bipartisan achievement that far outstripped his actual performance. His reliance on Tom Coburn was the equivalent of Paul Ryan's reliance on Ron Wyden. If Ryan is not the deal-maker Romney claims then he's not a solutions man. He's just an articulate spokesman who has won the respect, devotion, and loyalty of his team.

Ryan's ability to broker bipartisan compromise is particularly important given the ambition of the candidate's ideas. How do you put something like his Medicare plan in place when the public is reluctant? A new survey conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 58 percent of Americans want Medicare left alone. How do you overcome this opposition? Not through assertion, but through bipartisan cooperation and explanation that reaches beyond your teammates. That's what Gingrich was talking about when he criticized the Ryan plan as "right wing social engineering." The former speaker made this assertion based on his career of passing legislation with a Democratic president. Doing big, bold things requires skills of salesmanship that neither Romney nor Ryan have demonstrated. Yet Romney asserts that these skills are part of the Ryan package.

Ultimately, selling the boldness of the Ryan plan falls on the candidate at the top of the ticket. If the Ryan pick was a bold vote for a campaign of specifics, Romney has not suddenly started talking at length about Medicare reform. That's not surprising. Who wants a PowerPoint presentation during the honeymoon? However, it does suggest that we should set our expectations low when it comes to specificity. The campaign still hopes that this election will be a referendum on Barack Obama. That means the focus will largely remain on Obama. But the campaign also knows that being the anti-Obama isn't enough to get Romney elected. Voters also want to know that Romney has a plan. Ryan helps Romney fulfill that requirement.

Romney and Ryan want points for being leaders without having to get into the details of how they'd lead. The Romney team does not want the campaign to turn into a House Budget Committee mark-up where every idea Paul Ryan has had is debated. That outcome would be bad for three reasons. First, campaigns are no place to talk complicated policy, especially if you have the burden of explanation (as Romney and Ryan do on Medicare). Second, Romney is not as good a salesman of Ryan's views as Ryan is. Three, a deep policy discussion inevitably exposes daylight between Ryan and Romney, and that will give Democrats more opportunities.

To play offense in the Medicare battle, Ryan will travel to Florida later this week to attack President Obama for the Medicare provisions contained in the Affordable Care Act. This trip is a crucial debut. But Ryan's trip is about more than the debate over the future of the program. It's a test of the campaign's theory of boldness. Part of what the Romney/Ryan ticket is arguing is that they should get leadership points for being bold about tough issues. It's an interesting theory. Usually politicians say they're bold, seek the credit but then never actually present anything that is bold for fear of terrifying people. That's what Bush did with Social Security reform and what Obama did with health care reform during their campaigns. (Remember, Obama wasn't for the individual mandate as a candidate.) Ryan is going to try campaigning on boldness when the boldness is actually down on paper.

In his 60 Minutes interview, Ryan said that he wasn't going to destroy Medicare because his mother, who lives in the battleground state of Florida, benefits from the program. This was a prelude to another strategy we're likely to see more of in the coming weeks as Ryan deploys his biography. Romney campaign aides argue that Ryan will help Romney connect with middle-class voters the way Biden helps Obama do the same. This election is in large part about how a small number of swing voters feel about which campaign team is going to be on their side. Ryan's story of being a middle-class kid whose dad died when he was young is the Romney campaign's shield against the claim that the GOP ticket only cares about the wealthy. It's a story Democrats can't refute, but they'll do their best to make it hard for him to tell it.

[democracy8]

I apologize for the previous repeat posts.

[democracy8]

People forget that the very nature of our economic history has changed drastically since the founding of our country. At the time of our founding, we were essentially an agrarian society, mostly either with each family working their own plot of land for their own survival or families that used slave labor to make their income. Certainly, there were also urban areas where people worked in shops and other businesses for a "boss", or traded their crops or goods, but by and large, people were more self-reliant in that they worked more for themselves.

With the abolition of slavery and the rise of the Industrial Revolution, that changed drastically. Many more people moved to the cities to work in manufacturing and freed slaves and the more rural white population became shareholders. Thus the initial surge of what we now call "capitalism."

Since even before the turn of the 20th century, we have seen a vast movement from working for oneself in a strictly self-reliant agrarian manner to either working for another or working for ourselves in an urban setting.

Whereas we used to be able to essentially provide for ourselves directly from working the land, we now used our skills under someone else in order to get our income. Again, there were markets back in the days of our Founding Fathers where people traded crops, goods, etc., but look at how far we've moved from that since then.

Now most of us can't grow our own food, make our own clothes, and in other ways provide directly for ourselves.

It takes money to make money and most start-up businesses are rarely successful because of the major changes in how business is done over time. Simply having a work ethic does not guarantee success.

[democracy8]

Ronald Reagan's Budget Director destroys any credibility Paul Ryan could claim. He just slams the heck out of this guys BS financial nonsense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share

[marcie10000]

Does Bain Capital have an interest in Clear Channel? Why can't You People see the Romney 2000 - 2009 tax returns?

[rgoyalk]

The present GOP (better should be called the NOP, the NO Party) is only a distant shadow of itself. Its on the wrong side of major issue. Examples abound in health care, women's rights, climate change, equal rights for everyone irrespective of color, caste, creed or gender orientation. Its aparty that caters to 1% of the populace at the expense of 99%. Fifty years from now, historians will render a very cruel judgement about it.

[cubscout09]

Ron Wyden has weathered re-election against a Tea Party candidate.
After Oregon got through with them, in 2010, FreedomWorks rolled up their tent, packed their carpetbags and left the state.

You can do this in your state, too.

[bbglow]

Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040

My fellow Americans:

Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.

...

IV.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present ... and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

...

[cubscout09]

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws, and farm programs, you would never hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

[marcie10000]

bbglow - you are so spot on - I look forward to more of your posts!

[democracy8]

Ronald Reagan's Budget Director destroys any credibility Paul Ryan could claim. He just slams the heck out of this guys BS financial nonsense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share

[democracy8]

Ronald Reagan's Budget Director destroys any credibility Paul Ryan could claim. He just slams the heck out of this guys BS financial nonsense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share

[bbglow]

Dear Gov. Romney & Rep. Ryan,

I agree with you 100% that we must protect the promise of America including freedom, liberty and opportunity for future generations. I agree that hard work and dedication should determine a person's worth and those looking for a government handout should be suspect. I agree that government should be limited to it's responsibility to the people and duty under the constitution and held responsible when it violates that duty. That is exactly why I am not voting for either of you.

I totally bought in to the Reagan plan for prosperity. I believed that if I worked hard in support of the people able to finance and grow America that as they rose in wealth my boat would also float higher. However, the reality has never matched the rhetoric.

As I dedicated myself to the trickle down ideal and gave my youth and effort to cubical confinement, the following is what I have experienced and noticed:

- As your cronies gained in wealth their boats got larger and larger and floated higher while the greater majority's situation began to stagnate.

- As your wealth grew, the magnitude was no longer acceptable so it became necessary to send American work off-shore and then proceed to rationalize this apparent necessity by blaming the displaced for not having the motivation to work.

- New and unique ways were invented to stagnate and rob 401K's and investments while huge salaries were channeled to the innovators and creators of the deception while also inventing derogatory terms like Muppets and Aunt Millie for the working life blood channeled to your accounts.

- When events made it necessary to defend America and call for sacrifice your cronies in their infinite wisdom determined it was now time for tax breaks that by percentage benefited the wealthiest allowing the disparity between have and have-not to grow to historic levels.

- With unfunded wars, reduced revenue and a growing government deficit it was once again necessary to find blame with the displaced because of their apparent ever-growing dependence on government.

- With depleted employment and reduced revenue the government deficit grew and once again it became necessary to blame the now growing displaced Americans as the responsible ingrates because they apparently are no longer of value to your personal wealth objectives.

- As emphasis grows abroad and revenue resources diminish it is now becoming necessary to deny the need to improve America's infrastructure and education, nevertheless, pointing the sons and daughter of these same displaced and rejected Americans to defend the growing interests abroad as the remaining value you wish to capitalize on.

I could cite additional examples, however, this alone is enough for me to proclaim I will not vote for either of you because it is my belief that your belief is that America's opportunities belong to only you and your cronies and nobody else. When I was deprived of work and opportunity I would have been much worse off if not for the government I love and the democratically minded who understood and empathized with my situation. If government obligations are growing in an uncontrolled manner as you proclaim, it is your greedy policies that are to blame. Inventing terms like right-to-work and then denying employment represents the insanity of your thought process. Your desire to control government means people like me are at your disposal and reducing regulation translates to more deceptive investment strategies along with more worker and environmental exploitation.

If you want me to vote for you next time around it is necessary for you to demonstrate your value to society. Using your wealth to create greater than subsistence level employment and making government protections stronger and more efficient is a necessary first step. I will not vote to place me and my family at your mercy so that you and your cronies can enjoy the better life at the expense of someone else.

Regards,
Strongly Independent American Voter

[marcie10000]

Excellent comment bbglow. Thank you for taking the time to write it. Can I just add that my brother took Mitt's place in the Tet Offensive while Mitt was in France? That alone makes me so angry when he (Sheldon Aldelson) engage in chickenhawk rhetoric.