Judged by the entirety of his career, Ryan is merely a good-looking version of a typical Obama-era Republican. He calls for budgetary discipline while exploding the deficit. He speaks of lowering taxes but merely shifts the burden to the middle class. Back in the Bush administration, he rarely met a boondoggle he didn’t embrace. On social issues, he may as well be Pat Robertson: Ryan co-sponsored a federal “fetal personhood” amendment, voted to defund Planned Parenthood, and offered legislation to prevent Medicaid from funding abortions even in cases of rape or incest.
Yet the punditocracy fantasy version of Ryan persists and has now corrupted the mainstream media’s narrative, as if Elvis actually were in the building and planning to sing “Love Me Tender” to the GOP in Tampa. As Matt Miller pointed out in the Washington Post, ever since Romney picked Ryan, the news “has been filled with talk of the ‘fiscal conservative’ [NPR] ‘intent on erasing deficits’ [New York Times] who has become ‘the intellectual heart of the Republican Party’s movement to slash deficits’ [Washington Post].” These are decidedly odd descriptions to apply to a politician whose original plan would have likely added $60 trillion to the national debt—reduced to a mere $14 trillion in its more recent formulation.
What lies behind the pundits’ need to create this fictional figure who, in the ridiculous words of the formerly respected right-wing historian Niall Ferguson, “is the one guy in Washington paying attention”? That’s a column for another day. Today’s problem is that the 2012 election may be decided by the punditocracy’s self-delusion and serial dishonesty. It is no exaggeration to say that Paul Ryan’s plan for America, now embraced by Mitt Romney, constitutes a declaration of class warfare by the superwealthy against the rest of us—coupled with an invitation to economic and environmental chaos, and with a side order of political repression and social regression.
MORE: Paul Ryan: The Man Who Wasnt There | The Nation.