It's
official: The Republican Party is now officially a wholly-owned
subsidiary of the Koch brothers. How else to explain Republican
presidential candidate Mitt Romney's pick of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wis., as
his running mate. Yes, that Paul Ryan -- chairman of the House Budget
Committee and author of the infamous Ryan roadmap budget plan, which
promises to turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system, and yank
health care from millions of children whose parents happen to be poor.
And that's just the beginning. In addition to a raft of cuts, the Ryan
plan would end the Earned Income Tax Credit, which millions of parents
count on.
It's a plan that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
deemed too "radical." Asked by NBC's David Gregory to respond to Ryan's
proposal, Gingrich
famously said (video):
"I
don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than
left-wing social engineering. I don't think imposing radical change from
the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to
operate." (Of course that was before Gingrich walked back
those remarks, apparently reminded by some savvy operative that he
might not want to anger the Kochs, to whom Ryan, 42, is something of a
youthful ward, having been the beneficiary of years of support from the
Koch-founded Americans For Prosperity.)
In case anyone
should miss the point that Ryan is a very Kochy guy, Romney is doing his
big reveal of Ryan this morning aboard the U.S.S. Wisconsin, a
decommisioned ship docked in the all-important swing state of Virginia.
However important Virginia is to the electoral math, Wisconsin is a
symbolic icon for the Tea Party. It's not only Ryan's home state; it's
the poster state of right-wing triumph, the place where Gov. Scott
Walker successfully fended off a recall attempt by progressives in
response to a bill he rammed through the state legislature that all but
ended collective bargaining for the state's public employees. Much of
the credit for Wisconsin's right turn goes to Americans For Prosperity,
which boasts a particularly aggressive Wisconsin chapter, which began
building a network of activists there in 2005.
Ryan's association with the group goes back almost that far. In 2008, he was
granted
the Wisconsin AFP chapter's "Defending the American Dream" award,
handed to him by a young county executive who served as emcee for those
festivities -- a guy named Scott Walker. Since then, he has made
countless appearances on the group's behalf, at anti-health-care reform
rallies on Capitol Hill, on conference town halls across the country and
at Americans For Prosperity and Americans For Prosperity Foundation
events. (Just enter Ryan's name into the search engine on the Amerians
For Prosperity Web site, and you'll come up with
eight pages
of citations.) In fact, Ryan was due to speak at last week's conference
sponsored by the AFP Foundation in Washington, D.C., forcing increased
speculation about his running-mate prospects when he
failed to show.
For
Romney, the pluses in picking Ryan are these: the Tea Partiers, who are
less than wild about Mittens, really love them some Paul Ryan -- as
does David Koch, who will be seated as a Romney delegate at the
Republican National Convention in Tampa. Koch and his brother, Charles,
are major donors, not only to political candidates, but to
a range of right-wing think tanks and groups.
In the post-Citizens United world, those donations add up to millions
in political advertisements by all manner of non-profit groups. Already,
Americans For Prosperity has made a
$27 million air-time buy for running anti-Obama ads.
Romney
already owes some of his success in the primary season to Koch's
favorite politicians in Wisconsin. Remember Rick Santorum? Right-wing
base types -- Christian evangelicals and Tea Partiers -- just loved him.
He was giving Romney a whole lotta
agita during the primaries
-- first stealing Romney's reported win in the Iowa caucuses back from
the Mittster in a recount, and nearly besting Romney in Michigan, where
Romney grew up.
In the weeks leading up to the Wisconsin primary, Santorum was running double-digits ahead of Romney. But then
Paul Ryan endorsed Romney,
and so did the Koch-bought U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. When Ryan began
campaigning with Romney in the final days of the campaign, the crowds at
Romney events seemed to swell. While conventional wisdom holds that
endorsements don't amount to a hill of beans, conventional wisdom had an
epic #FAIL on Wisconsin's primary night, when
60 percent of those responding in exit polls
said that Romney's endorsers influenced their vote. (Romney also won
the endorsements of a number of Americans For Prosperity-backed state
legislators.)
But Romney's Ryan pick is not without its minuses,
the largest one being running with a guy who has promised to end
Medicare and replace it with something else entirely that could wind up
costing seniors big-time. Don't be fooled by the fact that Ryan calls
his voucher-health-care system for seniors "Medicare". That's just a
trick -- like an employer who promises you dental coverage that amounts
to a coupon for a discount on a visit to your favorite dentist.
Of
course, photos of the children who would lose health-care under the
Ryan plan would probably not play well for Romney, either. Democracy
Corps, the polling outfit run by Stan Greenberg and James Carville,
found Ryan budget to be a drag on Romney's prospects for moving swing
voters into his column. (Greenberg refers to the key Obama coalition
of unmarried women, youth, and minority voters
as the "Rising American Electorate.) From their latest
memo, issued in July:
The
Ryan budget’s impact on the most vulnerable is powerful among key swing
voters, including unmarried women, who shifted a net 10 points toward
Obama, the Rising American Electorate (net 3-point shift), and
independents (net 9-point shift). Even conservatives were swayed,
shifting a net 13 points toward Obama.
Among those who heard an
even split of facts about the Ryan budget – including ones about cuts to
programs aimed to help mostly lower and working class families – the
shift is even more pronounced. With this group of voters, Obama leads
Romney by 9 points, 52 to 43 percent, the largest margin of any of the
groups in our experiment. It’s clear that focusing on what the Ryan
budget does to the most vulnerable Americans can pay dividends for
Obama.
Looks like the Koch brothers are going to have
to throw a whole lot of money at this thing to make it work for them.
But we know they've got plenty of that.
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