Former Speaker of the House John Boehner quit the job with a tear in his eye, and for weeks House Republicans have been thrashing around, trying to find a replacement. Political reporters have had a field day. They’re speculating about the kinds of things pundits always speculate about — namely, what the impact of the inability to choose a replacement Speaker will be at the ballot box — without arriving at a clear answer.
Here’s the clear answer: voters don’t care. Seriously — we just don’t. We’re so used to a dysfunctional Congress that an intraparty dispute about who should be the Speaker of the House really has no impact. As a voter, you can’t help but think about how you might be affected by what Congress is doing, and leadership squabbles and political infighting have no plausible impact, period. It may be full of nuances and backroom maneuvering that is fascinating to the punditry, but for the average Joe it’s just more background noise emanating from Washington, D.C., the capital of background noise-making.
It’s being reported today that Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Congressman who was Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate in 2012, has answered appeals that he stand for Speaker by setting certain conditions in a meeting with fellow House Republicans. According to the New York Times article linked above, Ryan said he would serve if House Republicans could unite behind him as a common force, if the “bomb throwers and hand wringers” would shut their yaps for a while, and if he could serve as a communicator and legislator rather than a peripatetic fundraiser.
Ryan says that he changed his mind about potentially serving as Speaker because he concluded that this is a dire moment for the country, with all kinds of budget issues lurking, including a fight about extending the federal debt limit — again — and an impending dispute about funding needed to avoid a governmental shutdown — again. I’m not sure how “dire” all of this is, really, because we have seen these same issues, over and over, under Congresses and Administrations controlled by both parties. It’s hard to conclude that the current state of affairs is any more dire than what we have seen before, where the inevitable result is a last-minute compromise that just delays the issue for a while longer.
Ryan says he thinks Congress has become the problem, and he wants it to become the solution. Sounds good — but words are just wind. If Ryan can really get Republicans to unite behind him, and can actually get Congress to act in a responsible way by making meaningful budget cuts, voters might actually sit up and take notice. Until then, we’ll just ignore the stupid shenanigans and silly infighting and go on about our lives.
In my view, the most important issue confronting our country is our federal deficit and national debt — the latter of which has passed the $16 trillion mark. I care about other issues, of course, but I view our debt as the most fundamental issue of all because it involves basic concepts of national sovereignty. Our debt is so large, and has existed for so long, that we tend to think of it as a kind of abstraction . . . but every dollar of that debt is a real obligation of our country, reflected in an instrument sold by the U.S. treasury to a willing buyer who will be paid a specified interest rate. With each additional bit of borrowing, we give those people from whom we are borrowing leverage that may allow them to dictate terms — at first, the terms of the debt instruments, by insisting on higher interest payments, and then eventually the terms of how our government operates, by dictating whether we need to adopt austerity measures in how our country operates if we hope to obtain additional loans. At that point, our national sovereignty is at stake.
I don’t think President Obama places a high priority on grappling with our deficit and debt problems. He’s talked about them, but his actions speak louder than his words. He continues to propose budgets that would result in trillion-dollar debts for years into the future, and continues to propose the creation of new federal agencies and federal programs as the solution for every problem. He hasn’t used the bully pulpit of the presidency to encourage Congress to act. I’ve seen nothing from President Obama to indicate that his performance over the next four years on this crucial issue of national sovereignty would be any different than his performance over the past four years.
It was odd to hear a political debate rather than to see it, as if we had been hurled 50 years back in time to 1960. And, as legend says was the case for the first Kennedy-Nixon debate that year, the visual TV medium apparently created a different perception of the Biden-Ryan debate than did the aural radio experience. Because we were just listening, we didn’t see Vice President Biden’s facial expressions and physical gestures that have been the subject of so much talk.
I know many conservatives have been slavering for this match-up, and I imagine many Democrats are hoping that Biden can right the ship after President Obama’s underwhelming performance during the first presidential debate. The 
Kish thought President Clinton knocked it out of the park with his vigorous defense of President Obama’s performance and critique of the Republicans. I thought the speech was too long and too unfocused, flitting from topic to topic on hummingbird’s wings without establishing any kind of theme, and not very convincing besides.
I also was struck by President Clinton’s point that the big difference between his tenure and now could be summarized in one word: arithmetic. He argued that Republican proposals don’t add up. The use of “arithmetic” is interesting because a popular t-shirt in Republican circles these days is a play on the famous 2008 Obama “hope” poster; it features a silk screen of Paul Ryan with the word “Math.” Republicans argue that it is President Obama’s budget proposals that violate basic principles of mathematics and are based on phony “savings” and overly optimistic assumptions about economic growth. Is President Obama well-suited to attack Republican arithmetic when he has presided over a series of years that have produced trillion-dollar deficits, and his own budgets forecast enormous deficits for the foreseeable future?
We’ll be seeing a lot more of them all in the days ahead.
It feels like a close race here, too. In 2008, there was a remarkable outpouring of support in Ohio for President Obama. You saw it in unlikely places like Upper Arlington, a Columbus suburb that traditionally has been a Republican stronghold. The President won Ohio by nearly 5 percentage points.
My first reaction to Ryan was: he looks like a Boy Scout. Squint at him long enough, and you won’t see a guy in a suit but a Scout in a crisp uniform and tie, displaying merit badges galore. Ryan has retained not only boyish looks but also boyish mannerisms, looking at you sheepishly from under his eyebrows, with his head tilted forward and a lopsided grin. It’s as if he were apologizing to you for taking a short cut of his own devising when he ties a perfect slip knot.
The speech will be important, because President Obama’s supporters are doing what they can to convince us that Ryan is a dangerous extremist, a fringe politician who wants to scalp the poor and enrich the wealthy, push granny off the cliff, eviscerate the social safety net, and hurl the nation back into the dark ages. Of course, that’s what modern politics is like — we can’t just respectfully disagree with someone, we have to try to depict them as the devil incarnate.
Unfortunately, the situation that produced Akin’s Waterloo — where one public figure sits down with one reporter to answer questions — happens all too rarely these days. How often do political figures even appear on shows like Meet The Press? Rather than a Senator, foreign leader, or some other actual public servant, the guest often is a campaign manager or other unelected individual who is there to voice the talking points of a particular candidate, campaign, or party. Moreover, much of such shows is devoted to “roundtable discussions” where celebrity journalists who never have done much real reporting express their opinions about the “issues of the day.” No doubt the producers of those Sunday morning shows think the arguments that ensue make for “better television” than the Meet The Press format of the ’60s, where a panel of three serious, gray-suited reporters respectfully fired questions at that week’s guest.
To illustrate the point, consider the first Meet The Press that aired after Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate. The two “newsmaker” guests were Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Obama campaign guru David Axelrod, followed by a panel of journalists arguing about the impact of “Obamacare” and Ryan’s proposed budget on Medicare. Does anyone really expect much in the way of “news” (or enlightenment, for that matter) from such a lineup? Given the focus on Medicare, rather than featuring an ever-present hired gun like Axelrod or a tiresome panel of TV personalities, how about bringing in the chief actuary of the Medicare program, or one of the Medicare trustees, and have knowledgeable reporters who cover Medicare ask them some meaningful questions about the programs, its condition, and the expected impact of the competing proposals?
Of course, it’s too much to expect that any political debate these days could be done at a reasonable decibel level, without yelling or over-the-top metaphors. Nevertheless, I thought the discussion (if you can call it that) itself said something about the selection of Ryan. Rather than arguing about whether the pick would help Romney politically in this state or with that constituency, the commentators were talking about something of actual substance — the budget, our debt problems, and how we deal with them. How refreshing it would be if this election actually involved consideration of those crucial, meat-and-potatoes issues, rather than phony, grossly overheated topics like whether the evil Bain Capital caused a woman to die of cancer!
Another interesting time and timing issue was raised when the President talked about a “failsafe” that would be part of his plan. The President stated: “But just to hold Washington — and to hold me — accountable and make sure that the debt burden continues to decline, my plan includes a debt failsafe. If, by 2014, our debt is not projected to fall as a share of the economy -– if we haven’t hit our targets, if Congress has failed to act -– then my plan will require us to come together and make up the additional savings with more spending cuts and more spending reductions in the tax code. That should be an incentive for us to act boldly now, instead of kicking our problems further down the road.”
Webner House 