For those who have trouble telling Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor
apart, Ryan is the thin one with the angular jaw, full head of hair and
arrogant demeanor.
I guess that didn’t help much.
All kidding aside, Mitt Romney’s selection of Wisconsin
representative Paul Ryan as his running mate is, to state the obvious, another
play to the right. It’s now clear that those who thought that Romney would
“reset” and move to the “kinder, gentler” center once he won the nomination
were wrong. Whatever Romney’s stands were in the past, he now represents the rightwing
that has become the Republican Party’s core constituency.
The question of course is why would Romney still be playing
to the rightwing instead of trying to snap up independent voters by tacking to
the center with another VP selection? Why would he select as his vice president
the poster child for the calls to end Medicare?
The common thought is that Romney is still trying to win
over the extreme right that still distrusts him because of his previous more
moderate stand on key issues. But I’ve come to believe that from the start,
Romney and the Republican Party have had a two-prong strategy. One prong is to energize
the rightwing base to vote and the other is to suppress the votes of those
outside the base by passing and enforcing laws at the state level that make it
harder to vote. Plenty has been written
about each strategy by itself but no one seems to have noted that the two
strategies work hand in glove and could synergize to yield a Republican
victory.
On the national level, the math seems as wrong as the
immoral imperative to subvert democracy by preventing people from voting: common
sense would suggest that there are many more independent voters that Romney is
turning off with his bows to the rights than there are poor, minority and
student voters shut out of voting by new rules and de facto poll taxes in
Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Ohio and elsewhere. But the math might very well
work in a handful of swing states, and that’s where the election will be
decided.
Might work, but I don’t think it will, and Paul Ryan is the reason
why. He wants to gut Medicare, taking $750 billion in federal funding from the
program and turning it into a voucher system.
After the Democrats hammer the airwaves with Ryan’s Medicare plan,
Romney’s standing is bound to drop among independents. Ryan also gives core
Democrats, many of whom are a bit disappointed in Obama, another reason to
vote. Republican lies about death panels
and government takeovers may have made many Americans distrust the Affordable
Care Act. But study after study shows that Americans love Medicare just the way it is.
The combination of supporting lower taxes for the wealthy
while gutting Medicare will prove deadly to the Republicans. There are just not enough Democrats whom they
can keep from voting to offset the independents who will be turned off by Ryan’s
Medicare stand.
Changing the subject: I’ve been meaning to mention that
Professors Richard l. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff recently updated their
seminal essay on diversity among chief executive officers.
Zweigenhaft and Domhoff find that while there is greater racial and sexual
diversity among the CEOs of Fortune 500
companies, the overwhelming majority of them still come from an upper middle
class or wealthy background (except among African-American CEOs). The
implication of the article is that while we may have a more diverse society,
there is still little social mobility (movement between economic classes). It’s
a fascinating article!