Australia on Paul Ryan: Gimme a Goddam Scotch

Tues. August 14, 2012:

Australia Fair has its own take on the new Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan GOP ticket.


Saturday morning's stealth-surprise Romney announcement, of Ayn Randian congressman Paul Ryan
-- Wisconsin's rising star -- as the GOP Veep nominee, has been an American pundit's Field Day.

Tally up the number of U.S.A. pundits out there -- from Bloomberg News, National Review, NYT, New Republic, WSJ, and countless others:  Unless they were on vacation, like Paul Krugman, they have already published their opinion.

So far, if there is any consensus, not counting the wild extremes to left & right, it is this:

Paul Ryan is an attractive young rising politician, and his choice by Romney is either risky or shrewd or both.

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But perhaps more enlightening for us Yanks is the opinion of
one Guy Rundle [now writing from

London], a kind of leftish latter-day Australian Alexis deTocqueville,
who has recently been criss-crossing the USA, and writing about what he observes.

Enjoy [or not]:


Guy Rundle writes from London:
2012 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, MITT ROMNEY, PAUL RYAN:  
WHY MITT'S MATE, THE ANTI-PALIN PAUL RYAN, MATTERS

 
Mitt Romney has jumped out the blocks early, and announced a vice-presidential running mate -- Wisconsin congressman, and congressional budget leader Paul Ryan, a choice that has been met with bemusement, head scratching and an ocean of interpretation. In typical Mitt style, even the innocuous announcement of veep pick was something that Mitt stuffed up -- turning to Ryan, he announced him as the "next President of the United States," which at least offered the possibility of a spectacular Inauguration Day live suicide.

There was little else that was exciting about Ryan as a pick, on the surface -- he appeared, clad in the same white shirt as Romney, looking more or less like a young Romney, the exact opposite of the longed-for VP 
surprise pick, whether it be Walter Mondale's selection of Geraldine Ferraro in '84, or John McCain's recourse to Sarah Palin in 2008.

The sparsity of those choices makes clear a peculiarity of US politics -- everyone monitors the veep choice for a great surprise, the surprise is usually there ain't no surprise. No African-American or Hispanics have ever been chosen for the veep spot, and only one Jew -- Joe Lieberman, running as Al Gore's partner in 2000, and now a hawkish independent, supporting the Republicans on most issues.

For the most part it's been white guys -- the veep choice is usually a more, not less, traditional person than the presidential candidate himself. Ronald Reagan was a former actor some could not take seriously, balanced out by uber-WASP insider George Bush; Michael Dukakis was of Greek heritage, and Lloyd Bentsen all but strolled down the lawn and offered mint juleps y'all. And in 2000, Dick Cheney chose another scion of an old Republican family as his running mate. I can't even remember who Bob Dole -- Jesus, Jack Kemp, Wikipedia just told me. How obscure is that? Finally in 2008, Barack Obama made the wise choice of Joe Biden, who for all his fumbles and gaffes, could go around the north-east labour heartland and say (more diplomatically), the schwartzer's all right.

So the surprise of Paul Ryan is simply because most pundits expected that Romney would choose someone who would add a bit of, literal, colour to the ticket, and a sense of fire and life. Some thought he might go directly for the religious base, and choose someone like Mike Huckabee; others that he might get a twofer out of Hispanic/Tea Party favourite, Florida senator Marco Rubio. Choosing a woman was unlikely, after the Palin experience -- unfair, but there it is -- and the only high-profile one was Michele Bachmann, who makes Sarah Palin look like Hannah Arendt.

That they have gone for a square white guy is indicative; that the square white guy in particular is Paul Ryan has many ramifications. To the general white guys choice first. Various commentators have described this as "tepid" and "disappointing"; Noam Scheiber in the New Republic suggests it is an alibi for a loss -- Ryan's profile is highest as leader of the post-2010 GOP Congress extreme budget push, which read more like a synopsis for the Hunger Games than a document of modern governance, and the theory is that the organisational wing of the party is using this as a decisive demonstration to the party's right that they will be in opposition forever if they don't move to the centre.

That is mad, and only persuasive if one avoids the nasty truth about the choice of Ryan -- as a choice based on race, not Ryan's but Obama's. To choose the whitest guy around, and create the whitest guy team in history, is mainlining on the idea that a coterie of independent voters will consciously or otherwise, groove on the idea that they gave the African-American guy a try, and he screwed it up; more in sorrow than in anger, they will conclude that if you want a job done, you get a pair of white managers in. That is unquestionably the semiotics of the veep choice, ugly as it is, and people who don't want to see that, because they are too enamoured of the ideal of America, rather than the reality, miss its acuteness. True, Romney could have chosen Florida senator Marco Rubio, who, for all his boilerplate right-wing rhetoric, is an impressive man -- from a family of Cuban refugees, worked his way up, etc. He had a bit more help than he is willing to admit, but hell, he's a Senator, an eloquent speaker and a passionate man.


Sadly, to many of the vaguely right-shifted independents the GOP hope to attract, and especially those north of St Louis, that doesn't matter. When they look at Rubio, they see a busboy. When they see him in a suit, they reach for their valet parking ticket. That's rough, it's far from total, but there it is. To have a Latino on the ticket would have muddied the clear distinction between traditional authority, and the prejudices that is calling on. By having a presidential team composed of two men in white shirts, who appear to be modelling white shirts for a catalogue, the Republicans are effectively re-summoning the Einsenhower era, when things worked goddamit, and before the African-American and hippies started burning down the cities. Gimme a goddam Scotch. Make it a double.

                                          

By this move, President Obama and his administration become identified with the whole allegedly failed trajectory of the '60s -- Obama becomes identified as the first affirmative action President, and a whole slice of voters are thus relieved of voting against him purely on account of his race -- 'Well, we gave 'em a chance and y'know ...". Who are those voters? Well they're the voters Joe Biden fielded for Obama in '08. They're northern white voters in the rustbelt states. Unionised and leftish in some ways, they are not merely conservative in social matters, but identified with the American project, of greatness. They are the grandchildren of the voters that the Republicans persuaded to switch from Truman to Eisenhower in 1952, and -- given the appalling state of American social mobility (worst in the advanced OECD) -- they havent moved far. Few of them are vicious racists as one might find in the south, but many have a clannish, collective identity based around white working-class identity -- now based largely around the jobs that used to be there, which makes the sense of cultural identity all the keener.