I’m headed to the pool. They actually have WiFI there. What a country!
Use this thread to develop amusing anecdotes about the alliterative Romney-Ryan ticket.
Remember, always refer to Ryan as “House Republican Paul Ryan.”
Also, too, Romney once proposed a constitutional amendment requiring the president to have at least three years’ experience in the private sector. House Republican Paul Ryan has no private sector experience.
What do you have?
Isn’t there a saying “be careful what you wish for…you might just get it”? I kind of feel that the giddiness over the Ryan pick is misplaced. The media have in Ryan someone who they won’t scrutinize because they like him, so no matter how little sense his numbers make or how many lies he tells, they’ll just chalk it up to sincere disagreement between budget wonks, which they consider Ryan to be.
Like you said earlier, Romney can continue his lies, but now he has a running mate to hide behind and can (maybe) start running some positive spots of himself and let Ryan be the hatchet man. Add to that the fact that Ryan’s views are so radical that nobody would believe that they’re real, and you have a ticket made of one guy who doesn’t think he should be vetted and another who won’t be vetted.
No one believed they were real because the man wasn’t thrust into the spotlight. I believe it will change in the coming months. Romney’s been running since forever, yet there are still revelations coming out under more scrutiny. The same will happen with Ryan.
Maybe, but how much truth about Romney has really gotten cemented. Arguably the main thing that has sunk in about Romney is about his taxes, but in that case it’s about what we don’t know rather than what we do. Romney’s running a substance-free campaign, and the Ryan pick won’t change that, and the media is letting him do it.
You forget that the opposition has had time to prepare a negative narrative against the possible GOP VP picks and has even more weeks to pitch that narrative than they had in 2008. Turning up the heat on Mitt’s taxes early was a smart move as it pushed Mitt to announce his VP in an effort to get the tax issue off the front page. He may now have jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
Ok, well I hope all the confidence I’m reading / seeing this morning is well founded.
At the rate Mitt was imploding, it was possible that he couldn’t get out of the convention as the nominee. Ryan will stop that bleeding, but it comes at the cost of losing FL and therefore, the general election, and very possibly the House.
Heh – re: your “negative narrative” comment above – you’re absolutely correct – this probably didn’t just throw itself together in a couple of hours this morning:
“Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan
The Go Back Team
Romney and Ryan want to take us back to the failed, top-down economic ideas of the past.”
A snippet:
No offense but I think myself and a lot of others are just fed up with week-in-the-knee libs like you. That your initial reaction to Ryan is to assume the fetal position and cower is sad. Stand up to the rightwing already. Stop reacting to everything they do with, “Oh, what will we ever do???” It’s feckless, it’s cowardly, and it’s the surest path to what you fear. You take it right the fk to them and you don’t let up, just as the Obama camp has done to Romney for months now.
Your comment is just defeatism. Should we attack Ryan? According to you, it doesn’t seem like there’s much point in that. Ryan gives Romney some kind of invincibility or something. So we surrender and lay down to him, which achieves what exactly? We clutch our pearls and mutter to ourselves, “Oh dear, what shall we ever do? Poor, pitiful us?”
And, no, the tax issue isn’t the only reason Romney is tanking in the polls. Ryan doesn’t fix Romney’s disastrous overseas visit. Ryan doesn’t resolve Romney’s problems with Bain or taxes. Ryan doesn’t erase the detail deficit in Romney’s policies. Ryan doesn’t wipe-out Romney’s self-inflicted gaffes. In short, there’s just no way to fix a bad presidential candidate with a vice presidential candidate, because if a Veep pick is that significant, chances are people will start to say, “You know who should be at the top of the ticket, right?”
Here’s a reminder: Pres. Obama isn’t afraid of Paul Ryan. He’s so unafraid of Paul Ryan that when the President gave a speech eviscerating Ryan’s budget the President made sure Ryan had a prime seat at GWU to hear it. Do you get that? He didn’t cower in fear. He gave Ryan a ‘front row seat’ to the WI congressman’s personal beat-down.
Here’s another reminder: Remember the special election in NY-26 where the Ryan budget, as an issue, turned a seat held by Republicans since the late 19th century into a Democratic victory? Yeah.
Um…
The point I’m making is that the Ryan pick doesn’t make this some cakewalk. I’m all for pounding Romney/Ryan daily, and I’m sure we will. All I’m doing is saying we might need to temper some of the glee we see in the blogosphere.
I agree with some of your point that some of the giddiness in the reactions is premature. We’ll see. Let Ryan become an attack dog. He makes a great target. Even though most voters don’t let facts influence their choice, I don’t see how this choice for VP helps Romney.
Remember the initial reaction to Palin?
Since that, I’m a big doubter of Initial Reactions.
But I think the giddiness is at least slightly justified. One, because of the Ryan Plan. And two, I think people are mostly so gleeful because there was a lingering concern that Romney would pull some amazing ‘game-changing’ pick outta his beautifully coiffed hair. Which just didn’t happen.
Last time the GOP VP pick turned into a drag as her total lack of any substance became known. This time the drag will occur as the substance of Ryan becomes known.
Anything can change. I think a lot of the assessments are superficial and a bit rushed. “Got a deadline to meet…”, etc.
About the Ryan plan. Is it really going to relevant through the whole campaign? What happens if Romney backs away from some of the most toxic aspects of it such as the medicare portion? CNN is saying that such a thing could happen because now Romney is suddenly not embracing the entire Ryan plan.
I also don’t have any magic answers but I think its too early to see how the Repubs are going to work with this.
The Prez campaign takes a lot of effort from all of us but if we do our jobs, I think it is in the bag. The Obama organization has the reach, quickness, wisdom to respond to any shift the Romney-Ryan folks try out.
But I’m also talking out of a desire to take the house back and I want Obama’s coattails helping a lot of people out this year. I will be giddy with celebration when we win.
Can you imagine the recoil on the right if Romney backs away from what you call toxic and they call principled?
And I agree. All About Nancy.
I agree with Barath’s point that this doesn’t secure the election. It opens opportunities, but I have my doubts about how the MSM will spin it.
Most white people (well, anyone, but for this point, white people) over fifty should be terrified of the idea of Ryan getting anywhere near Social Security and Medicare, I saw 2000 and 2004. My mother has been voting Republican, and my sister, in The Daughters of the Confederacy has too. They will assuredly vote against their own interests again this election. I’m shocked that forty percent of Americans would even consider voting for Romney, but they will.
Ryan is an opportunity. If he (and House Republicans) can be tarred with their own words and plans then maybe this year could be a wonderful, massive burial of the crackpot Republicans. But Americans brought back Dubya for four more years of pain because John Kerry windsurfed.
Well said. Plus, apparently team Romney wants Ryan without his budget plan. Fitting considering that Romney wanted himself without anything he’s ever done, said, or supported.
interesting re: your point about too impressive veep puts the top of ticket in question, and that is that Ryan side by side with Romney makes Romney look old. I think it raises the question – ok, this guy is old, what has he been doing with his life? (answer: Bain and running for president – not good to bring that into focus)
No offense, but isn’t it fun putting words into someone else’s mouth?
I took his post as cautionary, rather than “assuming the fetal position and cowering”. I think you should re-consider your words.
Remember, always refer to Ryan as “House Republican Paul Ryan.”
Not, the Zombie-eyed Granny-starver? Or Eddie Munster? Or Howell III/Munster ’12? Credit for the first one goes to Charlie Pierce.
Not true that the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver has no private sector experience: He worked for his family’s firm for a few months, and also for a while drove the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile. Take that, you community organizer-lawyer-university professor do-nothing commie!
And he used those months in his family firm, and his experience driving an oversized dick, to become the multi-millionaire he is today. No wonder he loves Ayn Rand. He epitomizes the John Galt story, except for those bits about genius, hard work, free enterprise, and going away.
Looks like I missed some. From the Romney campaign:
“Ryan moonlighted on Capitol Hill as a waiter at the Tortilla Coast restaurant & as a fitness trainer at Washington Sport and Health Club. …One of Ryan’s summer jobs in college was as an Oscar Mayer salesman in Minnesota, peddling turkey bacon and a new line called `Lunchables’ to supermarkets – he even drove the `Wienermobile’ once.”
I’ll bet the waiter part is what put Mitt over the top.
Nah, it was the “Weinermobile driver” cred. Mitt needed a driver for his phony-bologna campaign that keeps getting stuck in a ditch.
Didn’t he do some speech writing for Jack Kemp?
He certainly did!!!
I liked the dkos comment “Wrong and Wronger.” The W’s make it perfect.
W. rong /and W. ronger
My current favorite is Bain + Pain
Charles Pierce beat us to the punch Ryan party.
The GOP wimp and screw “Grandma Millie” team:
My money’s on Nuns On A Bus.
And then there’s Boehner. I expect him to keel over in a faint anytime now. How will he muddle through? So many questions, so many Rep’s without facts.
yes, the nuns on a bus!!
I watched some of this big event. The roll-out distinguished itself for gamely bidding fair seize to “the narrative”, if perhaps the retired and decomissioned battleship was at once a decrepit and jejune, and the cribbed mood music went over like a funeral parlor PA system. But at least, for once, the campaign seemed to register with decisive movement, if only towards it’s shuddering final state. Yes, Ryan is the natural and inevitable running mate. Ryan is the only thing the republicans pretend even has substance within their shambolic campaign this year.
We’ve spent enough time studying the prospectus, we think we have an angle on this nice little speculative investment. Plus other strategies are not working so well…
Of course, we’ll tell the pikers in the press that we do not intend to run on the Ryan plan per se. No, we’ve got a Romney plan that is sadly confidential and will be announced at the appropriate time. With practiced dignified tones we will read consultant firm copy that tells you that before the plan goes into place we will of course be conducting numerous discussions/board meetings, which you might get invited to some, in which all questions and concerns will be heard and answered trivially or non-substantially or ignored.
These men are accountants and stock holders. They understand an annual report. And what it tells them is that shifting the tax burden to the 1% and eliminating public investment, while gutting or neutering regulatory (i.e. legal) oversight, is a fine plan indeed. They and their friends get a lot richer. For instance, their friends in the very politically active and multi-national Extraction industry gets to continue to shift the global externalities of pollution to poorer regions and future generations. Understandably the profits are mind boggling from that one.
What it comes down to is a great investment that pays incredible divideds. Plus, the government actually thinks your interest rate income is magically more beneficial to the common wealth than actual work. How nice is that? You get to pay much reduced capitol gains taxes, and if you’re really moneyied up you’ve got a whole office of accountants cooking up offshore accounts and blindtrusts to keep your loot oh so secure and air conditioned and maybe even invisible from mean tax collecters. How great is that?
I meant to say, “shifting the tax burden from the 1% to the 99%”. Obviously the really genuine tea-partiers pretend to believe that failing to cut taxes is in fact raising taxes. These men are generally republican office holders.
Employing a decommissioned battleship to announce the GOP team with no-foreign policy creds should go down as one of the most pathetic propaganda efforts ever.
I would like to find a source that would provide a daily fact about the spitefulness of the Ryan budget, broken down in easily digestible snippets. Like: “Eliminates 9,471 Head Start preschool slots for Michigan children over two years” (taken from Nuns on the Bus). But in more national terms, making the numbers even bigger.
These snippets could be Tweeted, Facebook, youtubed, and written out long hand and left every where (not in a way that litters).
Here’s a start.
Thank you!
The Obama campaign can attack the Ryan budget only if they don’t step on their own narrative by pushing Bowles-Simpson or some other Grand Bargain.
I don’t want to wake up in December losing Medicare and Social Security after an Obama victory just because Obama did not ask for a strong mandate to preserve them. And “fix them” does not constitute asking for a strong mandate. One fixes dogs and cats.
Obama now has earned the trust of a lot of voters; it’s time he used that to get the mandate for the change he promised in 2008 and whip the Congress into shape.
Otherwise, the historical judgement will be that he didn’t want to.
I’m a bit shocked by this crappy rollout. It seems to me that although their policies were always crap, the gop used to at least know how to present a nice show.
This was as bad as the Palin rollout: hurried, poorly timed, leaked despite them promising a suprise via phone app, really shitty presentation on a ship that only served to highlight their own total lack of FP expertise and military service, a craven play to the teatard/DC GOP establishment/corporate alliance that makes Romney look even weaker-spined than he already is.
Feel the excitemenzzzzzzzzzzzz
What happened to it was exactly what those on the left have been claiming for decades would happen to it if Democrats/liberals punched back as hard and half as effectively as the GOP did.
If Democrats bothered to actually govern like Democrats, they wouldn’t even have to bother with the whiners hired by the business and religious elites to make them ever richer and more powerful.