Paul Ryan may have a reputation as a truth-teller, but his convention speech was far from the truth.
Honest? Intellectual? Neither quality was on display last night when Paul Ryan gave his first major national speech to America and provided red meat to his fellow Republican conventioneers. Profoundly sarcastic about Barack Obama, taking one rhetorical swing after another about how the administration failed, he promised in soaring language that Mitt Romney and he would do far better, put America back to work, and save Medicare. How? Not a word. No mention of a plan, not even in broad strokes.
Perhaps Ryan was told to leave the plan to Romney during his acceptance speech. But of course, neither Romney nor Ryan has told us much about their plan at all. They will cut taxes, but will they close the deficit they so deplore and blame on Obama? The CBO says Ryan’s plan won’t do that for decades, and even that forecast relies on spending cuts and the closing of tax loopholes neither Ryan nor Romney will specify. This is honesty?
At the very least, Ryan could have told us why he believes in small government, not simply that he believes in it. He could have tried to present some evidence, theory, or even conjecture about how it limits growth. He could have sought a historical example or two of a better America. Of course, this would have been difficult. The facts don’t back him up.
Ryan said Obama was trying to sail on “yesterday’s wind.” The Republican chant about making the poor personally responsible for their own good is truly “yesterday’s wind.” Before Social Security, when workers were largely “responsible” for their own retirement, about half the elderly lived below the poverty rate. American policymakers paid too little attention to poverty until Michael Harrington wrote his book, The Other America, documenting how many poor there were. In the 1950s, before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the poor had to get by on their own, as Republicans would have it today. The poverty rate then was 22 or 23 percent, but now America’s official poverty line is lower compared to median incomes than in most other rich countries.
If Ryan is what passes for intellectual in Republican circles, the party is in serious trouble. He is an ideologue. He espouses faith in a small government dogma, not theory or evidence. And we have heard this chorus for a century or two. Good thing the nation ignored it and built a set of social programs that were central to the development of a middle class -- civil rights for black people and women, free education, major transportation systems, and protection from workplace abuses, old age, and the scourge of being born into poverty.
As Ryan said about Obama, his facts are merely true because he states them. Last night, Ryan took two big cheap shots. He had the audacity to suggest Obama was to blame for an auto plant that GM closed before he took office, when in fact Romney was opposed to the Obama bailout of GM. And of course there was Obama's $700 billion “raid” on Medicare in order to provide coverage for others, mainly the poor and the young. Obama is cutting back reimbursements to providers and a subsidy for Medicare advantage. It won’t affect senior benefits. But the honest and intellectual Ryan did not explain this to us.
The Ryan charade is about to end. Ryan showed himself last night to be a politician willing to distort the facts and cynical enough about his audience’s intellectual capacity to provide no evidence, theory, or history to support his points even if he had them at his disposal. The Republicans’ rising star turned out to be a breath of stale air.
Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Rediscovering Government initiative and author of Age of Greed.
Paul Ryan image via Shutterstock.com.