"The New Paul Ryan Is All About Heart"

[applegrove]

The New Paul Ryan Is All About Heart

By Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/new-paul-ryan-is-all-about-heart.html

"SNIP.....................

The most impressive thing about Paul Ryan’s political career is how successfully he has evaded any interrogation of his motives. Reporters are a famously cynical lot, prone to analyzing politicians’ words or deeds as maneuvers for self-advancement. Yet Ryan has carried off a brilliantly rapid ascent to power and influence within his party while being paradoxically described along the way as lacking political ambition. His intentions are forever pure. When reporters trailed Hillary Clinton’s “listening tour” of New York, they described it as an attempt to defuse the charge of carpetbagging, disregarding the possibility that she had developed a strong and genuine interest in agricultural life upstate. Even the cosseted John McCain had trouble persuading the media that his disavowal of his immigration bill, when running for president in 2008, represented a heartfelt response to his tour of the border, as opposed to a campaign ploy.

No such suspicion has haunted Ryan as he has embarked on a tour of poor, urban America. Ryan’s behavior certainly fits his political interest — the GOP’s empathy gap, its growing demographic handicap, and the disastrous 47 percent tape all obviously highlight a dire need for Ryan to position himself as a heartfelt champion of poor black America. This is not to say he does not believe in the role he is playing. What’s striking, rather, is how successfully he has persuaded the media not merely to accept his self-definition but to go farther, lashing out accusatorily at the suggestion Ryan is not quite on the level.

McKay Coppins has a long report on Ryan’s journey of repositioning or heartfelt conversion, depending on your level of credulity. Coppins, like all reporters allowed access to Ryan, takes the latter interpretation. (This is the price of admission readers have to pay for Coppins’s inside reporting.) Coppins presents criticism of Ryan as “rabid,”a “caricature,” and “personal,” and Ryan himself as wounded, misunderstood innocent:


When I mention one of his most rabid critics in the commentariat, the liberal New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait, he begins to chuckle. “That guy hates me,” he says. “I don’t even know what he looks like. Never laid eyes on the guy. But he does not like me.” ...




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[uppityperson]

1. all heart, no brain?

[LiberalElite]

2. You mean he got one finally? nt

[applegrove]

3. Nope. He's fudging the numbers/facts to make his case/narrative, as per usual.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/new-paul-ryan-is-all-about-heart.html

"SNIP..................

How to resolve this tension? One way is to assert that the best way to help poor people is to cut their subsidies. Ryan does indeed make this case, and Coppins endorses it:

If [Ryan’s] rhetoric lacks poetry, his arguments against the current state-centric approach to aiding the poor is compelling. Since Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” the U.S. government has spent an estimated $13 trillion on federal programs that have resulted, 50 years later, in the highest deep poverty rate on record.

This statistic is one of the very few fact-based policy assertions in Coppins’s story. It is wildly misleading. Ryan is using a measure of poverty that excludes a lot of the subsidies government gives to the poor. He’s saying, in other words, that giving poor people money doesn’t make them less poor, if we disregard the money government gives them. If we count such subsidies, then the War on Poverty has in fact reduced deep poverty substantially:

Government policies have significantly reduced the share of the population in poverty, and the share in deep poverty, throughout the 45-year period we examine, and with especially pronounced effects during economic downturns, in particular, during the recent Great Recession. Overall, we find that in the absence of government benefits, the poverty rate would have risen from 25 percent to 31 percent from 1967 to 2012, instead of falling from 19 percent to 16 percent. So in 2012, government programs reduced poverty by 15 percentage points — nearly half of its pre-transfer level — up from a reduction of 6 percentage points — about a quarter of its pre-transfer level — in 1967.

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[LiberalElite]

4. I forgot the

sarcasm thingy. :-P

[applegrove]

5. Oh cool. I thought I had not been clear.

[LiberalElite]

6. .

[DRoseDARs]

7. Oh, ok. Like this then?

[Blue Owl]

8. (Cheating) Heart, that is

n/t

[Mrdrboi]

9. All about heart for the 1%

No heart for the Common 99% folk.