Today Mitt Romney announced that he had capitulated to radical rightwingers in his party and chosen Paul Ryan (of Ryancare fame) as his Vice-Presidential pick. In case you’re not familiar with Ryan’s claim to fame, his budget (which Romney – in spite of his efforts today to pretend otherwise – has repeatedly endorsed), the following video will tell you all you need to know:

Pretty dreadful, right? Bear in mind that the issue of Ryan’s awful economic theories goes far beyond the presidential race. Todd Akin – along with most GOP House candidates – has also endorsed the radical and cruel Ryan budget. A vote for  Romney is a vote for Ryancare, a vote for Akin will double the damage, and sending GOPers back to the House will more than tripple the harm that Paul Ryan will manage, through their agency, to do to the middle class.

The selection of Ryan is not only problematic from an economic point of view,  however. I noted above that Romney is reluctant to emphasize his past endorsement of the Ryan plan, which suggests an additional concern about his ability to function as President. What does it say about his character, when he tries to weasel out of his own VP pick, deny his own stated economic beliefs – while touting a vague Romney budget plan that has not yet been vetted – and which, hence, cannot be criticized as thoroughly as the unpopular Ryan budget? Only fools think that in the political sphere they can always, in the words of the aphorism, have their cake and eat it too. Apropos of which, Ed Kilgore writes:

I struggle for a suitable analogy: becoming a Lutheran and saying you’ll maintain your own views on the sufficiency of faith for salvation? Hiring Mike Leach to coach your football team but reserving the right to tell him to install the Wishbone Offense? Marrying Kim Kardashian on condition she will avoid publicity?

Of course, any assumption that Romney would differ from Ryan on important issues like Medicare presupposes that his right-wing billionaire support base would even permit that type of independence. Romney certainly hasn’t had what it takes to stand up to the new, hardcore, fringewing GOP so far, which is why his running mate is a man described by The Globe and Mail as the ” Tea Party’s favourite nerd,” or an “intellectual version of Sarah Palin.” Intellectual in this context, of course, means that Ryan can speak in coherent sentences.

So Rush Limbaugh thinks our Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill is a “commie babe liberal“? Lordy! Sure fooled me. I can’t speak to the “babe” epithet, but nobody’s really a “commie” nowadays. It’s passé. McCaskill might be mildly liberal, although I think that she’s been pretty careful to try to hew to the right-of-center line with only tiny detours leftwards now and then. If labels were strictly a function of policy positions, I suppose I’d be inclined to describe her as similar to that old standby, the “Rockefeller Republican” with a little feminist leavening. But these days, of course, we Democrats make do with what we can get.

To make that point even clearer, McCaskill proved that it takes a centrist to know a centrist policy when she pointed out that Obamacare is a mild-mannered and moderate plan that lines up with many GOP preferences. In McCaskill’s words it is Ryancare for the non-elderly:

“The irony of this situation is that these are private insurance companies people will shop to buy their insurance. It’s not the government,” she told KMOX of St. Louis on Wednesday. “It’s exactly what Paul Ryan wants to do for Medicare.”

TPM explains the seeming GOP cognitive dissonance about Obamacare in terms of the underlying agendas of progressives and conservatives:

McCaskill’s point is an important one that exposes the real nature of the underlying fight over how to fix health care. The progressive ideal is a single payer system, a la Medicare, but for everyone. The conservative ideal is a deregulated market-based system with a diminished federal role. The Affordable Care Act, despite the right’s protestations of socialism, is a middle ground between the two. And the insurance exchanges mirror what the Ryan plan does to Medicare – as Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) have conceded.

These awkward admissions reveal that the broader fight is really about which direction to move vis-a-vis national health policy. Conservatives hate Obamacare because, by setting up regulated, subsidized exchanges for the public at large, it moves the existing system away from their goal of rolling back federal health care programs. Liberals hate Ryancare because, by replacing Medicare with a subsidized private insurance market, it constitutes a leap backwards from the current state of affairs.

As TPM’s Sahil Kapur implies above, no matter how big a backwards step Ryancare might represent, Obamacare still constitutes a mighty step forward for American health care overall given the nature of the previous status quo. It represents a necessary compromise in light of the rightward drift of American politics over the past couple of decades, which has created an environment in which a middle-aged, middling moderate pol can be described by a nasty-mouthed shock-jock as a “commie liberal babe.”

 

Finally, we get a glimpse of what GOP senatorial primary contender, John Brunner, actually thinks about some of the issues that Missourians are concerned about. So far, his approach to public campaigning has been like that of a burlesque fan dancer, tantalizing the audience with hints about what’s behind the fan while revealing almost nothing of interest.

Recently, though, Brunner lowered the fan for a tiny peak at what he’s got to offer. No tax hikes for sure – but we didn’t really expect him to endorse the popular desire to have the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share. He’s running for the nomination in today’s Republican Tea Party after all. Otherwise, he identifies problems he says he would address – like keeping jobs in the country – but seems unable or, perhaps, hesitant to let us know just how he would address them.

Most interesting is trying to figure out how Brunner reconciles his stated desire to “protect” seniors with his subsequent comment that the Ryan plan, which would privatize Social Security and decimate the Medicare, offers a “a fantastic step in the right direction.” To be fair, he adds that he would like to see a Democratic plan as well – seemingly unaware that it’s been on offer for some time. But, of course, financial stimulus to stabilize the economy, raising the cap on Social Security income, and endorsing those parts of ObamaCares that would slow the growth of health care and concomitant Medicare costs are all solutions that run afoul of GOP orthodoxy, and I suspect that Mr. Brunner would find them anathema.

I don’t know about you, but if this is all that Brunner’s got to show, it doesn’t strike me as particularly edifying. Nor does it deviate in any interesting way from what the other two candidates, Sarah Steelman and Todd Akin, have put on display. I hope he thinks that sinking a big chunk of his considerable fortune into the effort of getting himself to Washington so he can read from the same Republican playbook the other candidates have in hand is worth the price.

Photo by Michael Albov from Wikimedia commons      

FiredUp! has done an excellent job of detailing Sarah Steelman’s efforts to have her cake and eat it too when it comes to the topic of Paul Ryan’s plan to kill the Medicare program that has served us so well. Her spokesperson, Rick Wilson, has attempted to throw her a lifesaver as she grapples with the dilemma of how to avoid the poison apple that Ryancare represents, claiming that she doesn’t need to commit to Ryan’s plan or disavow it because “The test here is between people who are serious about reforming Medicare and people who are not.”

This response is, of course, silly since Steelman was asked to evaluate a very specific plan to “reform” Medicare, and her answer indicates that she is either not intellectually equipped to do so, or is afraid to come down on either side of the issue. It does, however, suggest that the real question is actually whether or not Medicare needs to be reformed and suggests further that Steelman believes it does. (Of course, last February she seemed to believve that Medicare was unconstitutional – ground she doesn’t seem to want to revisit right now.)

Perhaps the next question Steelman should be asked is why Medicare needs to be reformed. Contrary to the impression that all the current banter about entitlements suggests, Medicare is currently solvent and will be so for a number of years. It is also considerably more efficient in terms of its cost-to-service ratio than the private health care sector, which suggests that the issue to be addressed is not structural.  

The real risk to Medicare is rising health care costs that will cause demands on its resources to grow significantly. These costs have nothing to do with Medicare itself, but with our national health care delivery system. If the GOP would only stop their tantrums about “Obamacare” and assist its implementation like responsible adults, we would soon know if the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions that were designed to control costs were going to be effective and adjust them if needed. Of course, that would require a commitment to the real work of governing, rather than to ideology.

Remind me now, where does Steelman stand on the ACA? Oops! She wants to repeal it. Since our only real choices right now are between the models suggested by Obamacare or Ryancare, cutting health care costs or gutting a successful health care delivery system, I think we can guess where she stands.