JONATHAN CHAIT APRIL 15, 2011
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The very Washington controversy du jour centers whether President Obama's speech on the budget Wednesday was partisan. Deeply wounded Republicans are complaining that it was, in a Washington Post story that sympathetically conveys their complaint:
The three Republican congressmen saw it as a rare ray of sunshine in Washington’s stormy budget battle: an invitation from the White House to hear President Obama lay out his ideas for taming the national debt.
They expected a peace offering, a gesture of goodwill aimed at smoothing a path toward compromise. But soon after taking their seats at George Washington University on Wednesday, they found themselves under fire for plotting “a fundamentally different America” from the one most Americans know and love.
And here was Obama, the dark could of partisanship covering over the bright blue sky of bipartisan accord. The brute! Asked if Obama delivered a partisan speech, White House spokesman Jay Carney naturally denies it.
Of course, Obama's speech was partisan. He was recognizing that the budget debate reflects a stark partisan divide over basic values. yet the genius of Paul Ryan has been to frame a debate over values as a largely ideology-free exercise in accounting. Ryan objects to progressive taxation and the modern welfare state in philosophical terms. But since most Americans disagree -- they want no cuts in Medicare at all and higher taxes on the rich -- Ryan must present his case, in pecuniary terms, as I argued last week:
In the days before his star turn as America’s Accountant, Ryan once appeared at a gathering to honor her philosophy, where he announced, “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 continues to view Rand as a lodestar, requiring his staffers to digest her creepy tracts.
When Ryan warns of the specter of collapse, he is not merely referring to the alarming gap between government outlays and receipts, as his admirers in the media assume. (Every policy change of the last decade that increased the deficit—the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—Ryan voted for.) He is also invoking Rand’s almost theological certainty that when a government punishes the strong to reward the weak, it must invariably collapse. That is the crisis his Path to Prosperity seeks to avert.
Obama is perfectly aware of this. His speech was so wounding to conservatives because he exposed the philosophical stakes they have labored to obscure. What's more, Obama understands the phoniness of Ryan's pose as earnest budget wonk. CBS caught him speaking to donors apparently unaware of being recorded:
"When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he's just being America's accountant ... This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill -- but wasn't paid for," Mr. Obama told his supporters. "So it's not on the level."
Of course, it is certainly possible for both parties to address the deficit as an accounting exercise, without trying to later the philosophical basis of the social contract. But that is not what Ryan is attempting.
21 comments
The big difference between Tea-Party rhetoric, and what Obama said, is what Obama said has actual examples from the past embedded in it. Tea-Party rhetoric is simply disasterous predictions of future catastrophe, based on their fears of what MIGHT happen. And not citing examples from the past at all, except as complete distortions of what did happen. It's hardly fair to give Ryan a free-pass as a value-neutral accountant, when his proposal doesn't work accounting-wise OR value-wise.
- AllanL5
April 15, 2011 at 11:42am
Hey, Obama has something in common with the Peggy Noonans of the world -- he gets out his best lines when he doesn't realize the mic's on.
- bmoodie
April 15, 2011 at 12:11pm
Allan: Precisely. Republicans in general and Tea Partiers in particular are always in an uproar over hypotheticals, distortions, fantasies, or just plain lies. It always amazes me that America's Accountant has this innate ability to discover that the items that are busting the budget just happen to be , just coincidentally mind you, those items with which he disagrees philosophically. he's so courageous.
- dubyadoubte
April 15, 2011 at 12:25pm
Honest Paul, the Randian, is portrayed as neutral in his slashing attack on the poor and unwell, and Barack Obama is partisan because of his budget speech. Amazing.
- liberalref
April 15, 2011 at 12:35pm
This may well have been a planned Bartlett open mic moment. Pithy, yet devastating. Maybe I'm cynical, maybe it comes from having half a brain, but I continue to be amazed that there are people who're taken in by the sheer obviousness that is Paul Ryan. He's like the Stepford version of a congressman.
- NR409654
April 15, 2011 at 12:57pm
Harry Truman - “I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.” Adlai Stevenson - "We should make a deal with Republicans - if they'll stop lying about our policies, we'll stop telling the truth about theirs."
- Geoff G
April 15, 2011 at 12:59pm
Ryan is greatly benefitted by his innocent, pop-eyed looks. I've never seen such complete cynicism presented with such gee-whiz, gosh darn enthusiasm. He gets my support for next year's best actor in a dramatic role Oscar. Or should it be for comedy?
- esmense
April 15, 2011 at 1:10pm
Good for Obama. I say, hit him again and again. Also revealing how Ryan's response to all of this is a wounded whine, as opposed to actually standing up and defending his plan and its idealogical underpinnings.
- wildboy
April 15, 2011 at 1:17pm
I agree with NR and esmense. I've said it before here: Ryan wears a good suit and has a neat haircut, and that's it. For some people, including in the media, that seems to buttress his qualifications as a courageous thinker.
- ironyroad
April 15, 2011 at 1:36pm
That picture of Ryan is cruel. Let's keep it above board, folks, and not play the gotcha photo game. It's interesting that Ryan is being fronted as a sort of anti-Palin, as a way to shift the Tea Party brand from superficial and incoherent to "serious" and "brilliant". And yet. And yet. I'm not sure he's really all that different from Palin after all. They both have convictions that don't hold up under scrutiny, and they don't seem to question themselves particularly much.
- sokol8
April 15, 2011 at 2:57pm
And of course the cant about Obama's "partisan" speech (as opposed to the somehow non-partisan hackery the GOP has been foisting upon the world) quickly spread well away from the Post to all sorts of newspapers, down to even the wretched exercise in tripe that passes for the local fishwrap. As if Republicans never -- horrors! -- engage in partisanship. Pardon me while I go barf.
- cspencef
April 15, 2011 at 3:04pm
I would like it if every time Ryan spoke about how magnificent his efforts are in saving the country that the audience would laugh at him, stand up, put their thumbs in their armpits and wander about doing the chicken dance.
- Nusholtz
April 15, 2011 at 3:38pm
Techically, it's true that Ryan is courageous. Technically, it's also true that the mentally ill guy that wanders across a busy free way is also courageous. I am going to further demonstrate my Canadian roots by quoting the Tragically Hip, which is the best 90s rock group you've never heard of: "Courage; it couldn't come at a worse time."
- miceelf
April 15, 2011 at 4:31pm
I would say that the mentally ill guy is just mentally ill, m.
- liberalref
April 15, 2011 at 4:43pm
Boo-Freaking-Hoo Fraud boy Ryan... Wah!!! Wah!!! Wah!!! Apparently, being an Ayn Randian tough guy, non-paraiste forces you to cry and whimper if anyone says anything mean!!! Our President nailed you on his open mic comments. People should just point at you and laugh from now on, you are such an obvious fraud.
- MikeB.
April 15, 2011 at 5:05pm
Oh, sure, libref, but he also fits the media definition of "courage" Of course, I also believe that the Randian ideologue is just a Randian ideologue, but here we are.
- miceelf
April 15, 2011 at 5:13pm
Uh, for the babes in the woods, there is a long history of lying among Democrats, too. There is no question that we are going through a particularly dark period with the Republicans, concerning what Julian Sanchez, the libertarian blogger, termed "epistemic closure," in March 2010, and concerning lies, as well. But people lie and the last time I checked, Democrats are people, too. Take Adlai Stevenson himself, for example. Fifty years ago to this very moment, the Bay of Pigs Invasion was under way. The US ambassador to the United Nations happened to be a man by the name of Adlai Stevenson, and - believe it or not - this upright man outright lied about the US backing for the invasion. Imagine that, a noble Democrat lying. Furthermore, the noble John F. Kennedy lied like a rug about a putative missile gap that favored the Soviet Union. The Republicans told the truth. There was a missile gap but it redounded to the credit of the United States. That is what is always wrong with kindergarten primers like the above - they are Manichaean and simplistic and flatten out complex realities.
- liberalref
April 15, 2011 at 6:51pm
I hope no one believes that membership in the GOP conveys some sort of genetic predisposition to prevarification. If I find myself in the 60s, I'll consider Stevenson's and Kennedy's lying real problems to be called out and addressed. Living, as I do, in the aughts, well, I have to work with what's in front of me, in terms of lying and nutty ideologues. But I will keep an eye open for the reanimated corpse of William Jennings Bryan.
- miceelf
April 15, 2011 at 10:18pm
Oooooh! "The complexity, the complexity."
- roidubouloi
April 16, 2011 at 4:58am
I was not in favor of Obama during the primaries until he won me over with a similar reponse to the Australian prime minister, who cricized candidate Obama's anti Iraq war position:
- Nusholtz
April 16, 2011 at 7:10am
I'm stung by libref's libel of Adlai Stevenson - but I'm too old to cry, and it hurts too much to laugh. Well, actually, I'm chuckling just a little. And I stand by my earlier thesis which clearly and unequivocally and at great length made an airtight case that Adlai never told a lie, and the sub-thesis that no Democrat ever told a lie, except of course for the Dixiecrats, who, like every Republican except Lincoln, never told the truth. I don't think, however, that Repubs have a genetic predisposition to lie - it's not nature, but nurture (and in some cases, post-natal brain injury - I'm looking at you, Pence). Paul Ryan's eyes aren't blue - those are contacts, people! His natural eyes are as brown as cow-patties (though still quite dreamy, I hate to admit - if he was a Dem he'd be gorgeous). I'll bet Lib even thinks that Boehner was born orange - now who's being naive?
- Geoff G
April 16, 2011 at 12:10pm