I apologized initially for devoting a post to the ravings of Ted Nugent about ObamaCare and its contributions to the already intolerable burden of those notoriously socialistic New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs. But having just read Jeffrey Anderson’s pitch at National Review for Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s ideal running-mate, I unapologize in full. Because Ryan on the national ticket would confirm what Romney has been trying to obscure and deny so far in his let’s-just-talk-about-economic-indicators campaign: the GOP is determined not just to “repeal ObamaCare” or provide a different economic direction for the country, but to get the country back to the salad days of the 1930s before Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid–not to mention a generation of anti-discrimination, labor and environmental laws and regulations now deemed to be “burdens on job creators”–made the American dream fade.
Anderson says:
Before Romney secured the GOP nomination, Ryan was the de facto leader of the Republican party and has been throughout most of the Obama presidency. Ryan has been the party’s No. 1 ideas guy for a long time. He has served in Congress for 13 years, compared with Barack Obama’s three years in the Senate and zero in the House when the 2008 primaries began. He’s the chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee. (Senator Obama held no leadership position.) His budgets have arguably been the boldest and most forceful shows of political leadership from the GOP since the Reagan administration.
Yeah, de facto leader of the GOP, yeah, chief “ideas guy,” and double-yeah, “boldest and most forceful” budgets, though I’d say you’d need to go back to before Reagan to find the right analogue for Ryan’s audacious aims.
Anderson concludes:
{P]icking Ryan would clearly connect Romney to the post-Bush era of Republicans. It would be awfully hard to talk constantly about Bush-Cheney when running against Romney-Ryan.
But it would be much easier to talk about Goldwater-Miller. And Ted Nugent would be psyched.
