Joan Walsh: The GOP’s lost weekend

[highplainsdem]

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/11/the_gops_lost_weekend/

If Mitt Romney loses the election in November, he lost it over the weekend. The Democrats followed a lackluster Republican National Convention with a festival of unity in Charlotte, in which the frequently bickering party celebrated not just their candidate but their “We’re all in this together” theme. President Obama got the convention bounce Romney did not, but Republicans still hoped a disappointing jobs report might slow his momentum. It didn’t; in fact, GOP incompetence since Charlotte turned Obama’s small bounce into a leap forward, with Gallup today showing the president 6 points ahead of Mitt Romney; a week ago, they were tied.

I want to take a moment to make sure we fully appreciate Romney-Ryan’s disastrous weekend. I focused on Romney’s own stunning flip-flop-flipping on Obamacare, in which he promised to keep the law’s ban on discrimination against people with preexisting medical conditions and a provision that lets young adults stay on their parents’ insurance plans – and then his campaign said he didn’t really mean it. But Paul Ryan’s performance on ABC’s “This Week” and CBS’s “Face the Nation” may have been more devastating, because it underscored the cost of the Romney campaign’s dishonest insistence on obscuring all facts about how he would govern. Pretending he doesn’t believe what we know he believes, Ryan looked like Sarah Palin during her Katie Couric interview, unable to point to policy specifics a Romney-Ryan administration would pursue.

-snip-

When Romney picked Ryan, some people (myself included) thought it might herald a clear ideological battle throughout the fall. The architect of the Ryan budget is a right-wing economic and culture warrior; he can turn from budget slashing to antiabortion extremism on a dime (hopefully, one that still says “In God We Trust.) Now, I’ve never bought the line that Ryan was a Serious Intellectual. That’s the fiction spun by a Beltway media elite determined to ignore that the Republican Party has gone full-tilt crazy and obstructionist. They need Ryan to be a man of conservative principle and bold ideas, even if he’s not.

Yet while Ryan may not be the Wise Man of his Beltway reputation, I’m quite sure he can handle an interview. But when confronted by CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, he seemed shady and incompetent. When Stephanopoulos grilled Ryan on the details of Romney’s tax plans, he insisted now isn’t the time to get into details. He gulped. He blinked. He sighed. He gulped some more. He looked too small for his suit.

-snip-

[StrictlyRockers]

1. Great post!

Damn, I love this site! Thank you! Great writing!

I never go to Salon. I am always on DU lately...

[Spazito]

2. Good read!

Thanks for posting this, it is appreciated.

[brush]

3. Who wrote his budget

It's looking more and more that he didn't write that budget, the one that, as it turns out, doesn't even balance. Sounds like ALEC and the Koch brothers had a big hand in writing that document and pumping Ryan up as an intellectual budget wonk. It's rumored even that the Kochs bought his way onto the repug ticket.

[fleur-de-lisa]

4. Love Joan Walsh!

[monmouth]

5. Joan is a gem, too smart for Morning Joe but she and Chris Matthews are sublime on Hardball...n/t

[WorseBeforeBetter]

6. K&R

[Cha]

7. Thanks for linking Joan Walsh's,

"lost weekend", highplainsdem.

It was awfully apparent and glad she wrote it all down. Now Let's Keep Going FORWARD!